Summary: Continue building on crantastic to add more features needed by the community.

Description: Last year’s google summer of code project achieved its goals of implementing the basic infrastructure for users to find, rate and review R packages. Currently crantastic receives about 6,500 visitors a month, mainly (70%) as a result of searching for R packages using google. Some ideas for possible enhancements are:

• intelligent package diffs so it’s easy to see what has changed between versions
• a comprehensive function index to make it easy for users to what package a function lives in and for developers to find possible conflicts between packages
• display top related conversations from the R-help mailing list
• other ideas from http://crantastic.uservoice.com/

The developer would also be expected to be a crantastic evangelist, engaging with the R community to encourage their participation in crantastic and figuring out will be most useful for the community.

Skills required: Web design/development, Ruby on Rails. Also helpful is some experience using R.

Test: Fork the crantastic source code from http://github.com/hadley/crantastic and improve the existing source code in some way, by either refactoring existing code to make it cleaner and more maintainable or by implementing a small new feature.

Mentor: Hadley Wickham