As The Prouduct Owner What's My Goal?

I've been away from rails for a bit and to catch up I've decided to write an application to re-familiarize myself with the frame work and at the same time try and apply what I think I've learned about behavior driven development. There's an earlier post with more details.

Today, in this post, I'm going to be the product owner and attempt to define my goals for this project.

I want to create a blog with built in shopping cart functionality. The intention is that the original content generated for the blog will generate traffic to the site that can be converted into sales. I realize that if this was my only goal it would be smarter to use an existing blog framework that has an available shopping cart plugin, but it's not my only goal.

I want to break development into two major parts. The first phase will be to develop the blog and the second the shopping cart functionality. I'm going this route because it will allow the blog to start building traffic while the shopping cart is being developed.

This means I need to define what I want in a blog....

• It should support a write to draft, edit, preview then publish work flow. When drafts are previewed they should be seen exactly as they will appear on the finished page. Nothing annoys me more about blogger than the fact that it's preview does not use the blog's styles sheets.
• It should provide a sane default permalink based on the title but it should also allow the permalink to be overridden.
• It should allow additional alias permalinks. This is specifically to make importing the content of other blogs with different permalink formats easier.
• The markup should be a subset of html. I don't need a WYSIWYG editor or a markdown syntax.
• It should handle tags for blog articles and be able to display a tag cloud on the side bar.
• It should support interactive editing of javascript widgets for the side bar.
  
• It should handle article grouping to create a series of articles. When an article is made part of a series it should automatically include links to the previous and next articles in the series.
• It obviously needs to generate rss/atom feeds.
• It should support search but it can be an external service (google site search) if it's incorporated really well.
• It should support online editing of the site wide css. It shouldn't be necessary to change sources code, commit and deploy it just for a CSS tweak.
• It should support comments from authenticated users (OpenID and Facebook authentication) and anonymous comments after review.
  
• It should be able to import a blog from Blogger.
• It should support syntax highlighting for ruby, xml, yaml, css, html and json code.
• It should be able to compile a daily digest of Twitter comments.
• It shoudl be able to compile a daily digest of Delicious links.
  

That spells out pretty much what I'm after.