This is an experiment in making a derivative of etherpad which is better suited to coauthoring of documents for publication to a broader community. I've found that etherpad's UI, which is awesome for small teams of 2-3, ends up

• chaotic when dealing with a dozen or more authors.
• hard for readers to process, primarily because the editing UI and the inevitable markup gets in the way of reading.

Also, I've found that it's hard to keep track of what etherpads I've authored or read. Team etherpads help, but not enough, especially because I have a different password for each team.

To address these issues, I'm trying the following:

• every user auths using Persona (there are no anonymous users)
• every user gets a personal 'team-of-one', and (someday) will be able to manage groups as in 'old' etherpad
• pads can be authored using the etherpad editing tools (bold, etc.), or using markdown
• pads can be published -- those URLs are what you send to people you just want to read a pad, not coauthor it.

• Persona login works
• Currently all publishing assumes markdown markup
• No real team management features yet
• Lots more work to do, but the general framework of using Persona + etherpad-lite seems to work ok.

First, get the repo and the submodules:

git clone git@github.com:davidascher/coauthor.git
cd coauthor
git submodule init
git submodule update

Then, configure etherpad:

cd vendor/etherpad-lite
cp settings.json.template settings.json
edit that file!

Start etherpad, and copy the APIKEY from etherpad to the django dir:

bin/run.sh &
cp APIKEY.txt ../../coauthor_site

Start Django:

# make sure you have 1.3.1:
sudo pip install --upgrade django==1.3.1
cd ../../coauthor_site
python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py runserver &

Install, configure and run the front-end proxy (in dev, I use node-http-proxy -- in production, configure your favorite front-end solution (see instructions):

cd ..
npm install http-proxy
# edit frontend.js to point to the right ports for etherpad and django
node frontend.js

Should work! Go to http://localhost:8081 and see.

If you don't use 8081 as your front-end port, then you'll want to update coauthor_site/setting.py, or the BrowserID verification will fail.