RE: Forums are future work?

<snip>
In the first version of http://thetyee.ca (March 2005)
the vBulletin
integration with bricolage generate story templates was done
very
hastily and on a tiny budget so there may have been room for
improvement
that never got explored. How it worked was all bricolage
generated
stories were interpreted as php by the apache server, and
they included
all the variables required by vBulletin to dynamically call
the proper
comment thread from vBulletin mysql database. One of the
hacks to the
vBulletin database we did was to map bricolage story IDs to
vBullletin
thread IDs. This mapping occurred dynamically the first time
a story was
published.
</snip>

When I was at Grist, and with the help of David and Scoop's
Colin Hill,
we did something similar using Scoop <http://scoop.kuro5hin.
org/>, which
Grist was already using for blogging. Stories had a data
element field
for the comment thread ID. At publish time, Bricolage would
dynamically
create a dummy Scoop post by assigning a comment ID, and
inserting it
and other relevant information (title, description, etc)
into the Scoop
comments table. That thread would then be included in the
Bricolage
story via Perl embedded in the story's HTML. (I would have
preferred to
use a SSI, but Scoop is under a different document root and
is dynamic.)
It was tricky accommodating user log-in and redirection, but
we overcame
those challenges.

And since we're on the subject, I thought I share this from
CMS Watch's
"Web CMS trends for 2008":

<snip>
Trend #1: A Return to Coupled Production and Delivery

Customers are more willing to consider Web content
management systems
that couple content production and delivery -- or put
another way,
systems that couple content management with website
management. Vendors
are responding accordingly.

One of the main drivers here is the business imperative to
customize and
optimize the consumption experience in a (near) real-time
manner. Web
2.0 feeds into this phenomenon by fostering higher user
expectations
with regard to immediacy and responsiveness. AJAX has made
it easy for
widgets to either consume services or push data out to them
in real
time, blurring architectural boundaries. And user-generated
content may
mean the (re-)insertion of management services in the
delivery tier.

We see a greater confidence in high-traffic dynamic
delivery
infrastructures, but also some sticker shock at the
licensing
implications of distributing Web CMS services across
multiple machines
in the consumption tier. Interactivity comes with a price.
</snip>

Source: h
ttp://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/168-WCM-Trends-2008

Chris

-------------------

Chris Schults
Web Developer
PCC Natural Markets
206-547-1222 x104
chris.schultspccsea.com
http://www.pccnatura
lmarkets.com 

Thanks to all for the commentary. This has been an
educational thread for
me.

After reading this thread, and the wonderful article
mentioned earlier (
h
ttp://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/08/27/bricolage.html ), I
can see how
including discussion forums in bricolage could and could not
be desirable.
Low volume, desirable, high volume, not!

So, my new idea is:

* Use bricolage to maintain the structure of the content of
a site,
including SOAP to automate story generation.
* Have the output of bricolage be templates used by Catalyst
(usually
Template Toolkit)
* Using INCLUDES, these bric generated templates can be
included at will
based on the actual bric story IDs

Have I missed something?

TIA,
Karim Nassar