Forum OpenACS Q&A: Community Projects...

I think your idea is a good one, i.e. a centralized page for documenting OpenACS sites that goes beyond the simple listing-with-comments form we've got now.

As to when something like that gets down, seems to me we're all pretty busy with OpenACS 4.x at the moment!

One nice thing about openacs 4.x is that the independent module structure allows folks to offer alternative module implementations.  So, if your general comments module, once ported to 4.x, provides the same API to client objects as the existing one does then you could supply it as an alternative folks could download into their copy.

www.greatestnetworker.com
www.ercmembers.net
www.swainmortgage.com

In the case of my favorite, a private site called www.ercmembers.net, we are incorporating as many modules as we can, to make the system wide open for the use of our members.  While there are users starting to use it, it isn't "Grandly Opened" yet!  We have a group of people (approximately 500) who will initially be subscribed, and we're looking for about 1000-5000 members, we think.

So far, we have implemented User Homepages, WimpyPoint, File Storage, Classified Ads (with Auctions), and Whois-online/Chat.

To date, we haven't decided what to do with/about forums, but they will be very important for collaboration among our users, as is Wimpy.

We will be incorporating E-commerce with a paypal link setup, as well as Credit Card Verification.

At the moment it requires you to install a small script on your OpenACS site that will report the number of users, bboard postings and comments in your system (you can find that on the 'add my site' page). The module will poll all active sites every 24 hours, so the stats are kept up-to-date. For the time being, if you do not like to publish your stats, just edit the script I provide and return zero for all stats.

I am thinking of adding a 'more info' page, where the site owner can leave more info about the implementation time, modules that are in use, etc. That page can then also show some sums and averages of the the number of users/postings/comments in the last 24 hours, week, month, year, etc. (I keep a history of stats).

I shall not be insulted if nobody likes this, I wanted to try something small for the weekend. If you like it, please register your site on my box, if Don et.al. like it I'll be happy to transfer, data and all to OpenACS.org.

I learned a lot: I like Postgres but the documentation sux (for example, in pl/pgsql how on earth do I find out 'how many rows affected' after an update? and use that a return value of the procedure). OpenACS is also somewhat lacking, but there are plenty of samples, so that wasn't too bad.

I also found a silly bug in AOLServer+ad12, if you go to the site-register index page, and (with IE 5 atleast) press refresh repeatedly, AOLServer toggles between writing the headers before AND after the page and the normal behaviour. Not very pretty. Does this have something todo with me using .ADPs?

Use the get diagnostics command:

	declare
		my_row_count integer;
        begin

        	update foo set bar = 'baz';
		GET DIAGNOSTICS my_row_count = ROW_COUNT;

		return my_row_count;
	end;

See .../doc/postgresql/html/plpgsql-description.html in the pg documentation.

It was nice thing to toy with regardless :)