Re: Forums are future work?

>>> From: Karim Nassar <karimgiant-rock.com>
>
>>> 2) If #1 is "no", what are your
thoughts about adding forum  
>>> discussions?
>>> I think that a neat feature would be that you
could have a  
>>> discussion
>>> attached to any story. I would be the one to
implement it, and I  
>>> have
>>> several years of experience that would lend
itself to a nice  
>>> solution
>>> for your project.

I should have said in my earlier e-mail, if you have any
ideas about  
how this might be implemented in the Bric code base, I'd be 

interested to hear them.

I agree that it would be interesting, I'm just not sure
about the  
feasibility.

-Matt

On 10/23/07, Matt Rolf <rolfmdenison.edu> wrote:
>
>
> I should have said in my earlier e-mail, if you have
any ideas about
> how this might be implemented in the Bric code base,
I'd be
> interested to hear them.
>
> I agree that it would be interesting, I'm just not sure
about the
> feasibility.


I am working on a site that would need to automatically
generate thousands
of story pages. The two use cases I am trying to address
are:

*  Users to the site will want to discuss these stories.
Being able to
discuss the story right on the same page would be neat-o. If
it was ajax,
it'd even be Web 2.0, and I might get some venture capital
(just kidding).
* Users want to be able to search and browse forums, and
create forum
threads that are NOT attached to a story. However, any
discussion about a
story should be available in this interface as well.

Hopefully my motivation for integrated disucssion forums is
clear now.

After reading the archives and a day of research, my current
thinking is:

* Use bric_soap to publish stories
* Implement a discussion Element Type
 - this would be an ajax implementation such that the
discussion
functionality is completely contained on the page
 - this would be a template that could just be included
(even manually if
necessary)
 - perhaps add a flag to the story configurator to allow
discussions?
* Use Catalyst to implement ajax controllers and models,
Template Toolkit
for the view

I can't find a Catalyst implementation, and I think that it
would be a
relatively simple plugin to write, that can be extended over
time for extra
functionality.

Considering I have only partially read the docs, and not
looked at the code
base, is this feasible? It seems to me that Bric+Catalyst is
the killer
combo 

Thanks,
--
Karim Nassar

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 09:13:33PM -0400, Matt Rolf wrote:
> >>>From: Karim Nassar <karimgiant-rock.com>
> >
> >>>2) If #1 is "no", what are your
thoughts about adding forum  
> >>>discussions?
> >>>I think that a neat feature would be that
you could have a  
> >>>discussion
> >>>attached to any story. I would be the one
to implement it, and I  
> >>>have
> >>>several years of experience that would lend
itself to a nice  
> >>>solution
> >>>for your project.
> 
> I should have said in my earlier e-mail, if you have
any ideas about  
> how this might be implemented in the Bric code base,
I'd be  
> interested to hear them.

I have ideas about this, and in fact have started coding...

I had a brainstorming session with Phillip when we were in
Vancouver, and we spent many hours looking at the pros/cons
of implementions up and down the stack from how chats are
stored in the DB to how one would configure the network.

I'm now at a stage of imagining worst case use scenarios and
planning for stability/performance.

There are 3 ways (roughly) that I can think of approaching
this:

1) Complete integration, where this is deeply-tied into
Bric... I think this actually _not_ the route to go at all,
as it's blurring of the data-mangling that Bric does behind
the scenes, and front-end production _serving_, which Bric
doesn't directly deal with.

2) "Wrapping" a solution around Bric output --
this is what Allan did when he wrapped the Bric output in
Drupal processing. The problem with this is
a) performance
b) dealing with multiple paradigms dealing with data

3) Co-processing -- (the route in using) is something that
sits "along side" the production server, and does
it's processing, feeding back to Bric. In this case
Bricolage is still quite seperate from the actual serving of
content (as it should be, in my opinion), but the results of
the comments/forums are fed back to Bric for integration on
next publish. In my imagination, this allows
a) High performance
b) Better seperation of the front-end/back-end processing
c) Even better integration than a "wrapper"
method


> I agree that it would be interesting, I'm just not sure
about the  
> feasibility.

I'll keep everybody posted as events warrant...

> -Matt

-- 

-bch
http://www.methodlogic.net