Hi Luke,
I might volunteer if I can arrange some stuff with my boss. Hopefully I can help better this time than when I wished to help you with ETP.
A good point indeed that news, comments and bboard are the informal way to get content in. I have never though of it that way. So your idea is more like slashdot or php-nuke. Pretty good since those style is proven to work.
Maybe in the next release of OpenACS things can use more common stuff. But as of now I think a port of news removing the additional useless permissions and defering sws should be good. The code or data model reuse stuff is very good. Its one of the things that is good about 4.x against 3.x. Although there maybe down sides too like tight dependencies. This is evident in the OpenACS porting when some modules get broken because modules that is uses is being revised. Up to what level of code/data model reuse will the OpenACS aim for? A couple of hours ago I did appreciate that ACS 3.4.10 has very separate data model. One of the sites had a problem in file storage. I can easily go to fs_files and fs_versions table and nuke out the offending file. How easy can we do that on OpenACS 4.x? Dont know since I have not yet dug real deep in the data model.
Jun
