Forum OpenACS Q&A: Yet another OpenACS 4 website...

Hey Gilbert...

Great work!!! Those forums are looking very killer. Did you build them for scratch or did you template the standard bboards?

Either way, great work! I'd love to hear how you did all this stuff as it's a real departure from pretty much all the OACS-based bboards I've seen.

talli

PS
Hope to see many many "yet another OACS4 sites" from everyone!

Gilbert, like everyone else, I am really impressed. I especially liked that one could reply to the middle part of a threaded message and the threading structure branched to indicate this!!!! Please make my day and tell me that you have also used the appropriate header voodoo to make the email alters thread in mail readers like mutt. (That is about the only ACS 4x bboard improvement that I am frustrated has never been implemented on web/db forum)

Are you planning to package up and release your forum code?

heh, I've always hated UBB-style boards.  Oh, well.

My implementation uses some ideas from the bboards packages but it uses none of the bboards code.  Email alerts was one of the features I borrowed from the OpenACS boards (using the idea of map tables to map messages to subscribers).  However, I left out some of the other bboard features, not sure which ones, but the OpenACS bboard experts will be able to see what seems similar and what doesn't.  All of the messages have a tree_sortkey and a parent_id which helps me build the hierarchy.  Thanks to everyone who worked on the "connect by" solution!

Also what you don't see is the news and articles sections (you can guess the URLs for those sections) which are directly integrated with the forums code.  It's similar to the general comments package in OpenACS 3 where you can respond to any page, but I hard coded it because it was easier to do it that way :)  Again, those responses are threaded just like the rest of the forums.  The articles package allows you to upload files (.zip, .tar.gz) into a special (not CMS) area.  It uncompresses the files and places them in a special directory.  If you have HTML files, it will suck it into the database, and it will modify the links (img src and a href) to make the file paths correct.  You can also create/edit articles online.  I chose not to use the CMS because I couldn't figure out how to use it properly and because my client didn't really need to worry about tracking revisions.

Oh yeah, and there's an ad management package there too.  I'm still working on the layout for that part.

Cynthia - please tell me more about the "voodoo headers".

Jonathan - you can switch to a threaded mode (ie non-ubb mode).  There are some links at the top of the forum index page (thread, fancy, flat) which will allow you to go to your favorite thread layout.  It's hard to see the links and we're going to make it a graphic so it's more obvious.

Yes, my current plan is to release the whole package at some point in the near future (in a month or two).  But first, I need to clean up the code and work out all of the bugs.  My vision is that this will be either a separate distribution of OpenACS 4 (ie out of the box functionality) or you can use the APM to download the necessary parts and patch the core code with my tweaks.

Once you see the dotLRN portals package

And how long until we can see it? Do you know?

These all sound good, Gilbert ... ping me about getting these incorporated after we get our release rolled out.

Well Matthew, I for one, would be happy to get rid of the current bboard completely. I am all for nostalgia, but honestly, bboard (which is such an important part of a number of OpenACS sites I've launched) is one of the worst modules in the system. I agree that is WAS great when it came out, and it might be nice as a stand alone module (well, strike that...I wouldn't use it for that even). But, it's time to lay it to rest. I have TONS of ideas for a new bboard module, some of which Gilbert seems to have incoporated. I posted here not too long ago with a link to www.ikonboard.com as a possible replacement for the bboard as it stands. This is not an opensource solution, but I would at least look to it for inspiration. OpenACS bboards should have all of that functionality and MORE!

Should we have two bboards available to admins? Sure, why not. But, I would say, let's stop trying to bandage the old one...it's given up the ghost. We have the technology, we can build a new bboard...better, stronger faster than ever before. And for a whole lot less than six million dollars. In the same way that the current bboard allows the admin to choose one of three different styles (USEnet, Q&A and uh...US Geospatial? does anyone REALLY use anything besides Q&A...for shame) we might as well include the old bboard along with the new improved UBB/EZBoard/Ikonboard clone.

Keep in mind, that I'm no coder...but I could certainly write a spec sheet to keep a handful of coders busy for awhile! ;)

Scott

Sorry, , forgot to close that tag.

Whoa!  The [Open]ACS 4 bulletin board is NOT based on the ACS 3.x bboard package, not at all.  It's very different and while I have complaints about its under-the-hood implementation (which to some degree first I, and now OF, have worked on cleaning up) the feature set's a bit nicer than the old boards.

As part of dotLRN OF will indeed have to provide a level of e-mail integration not seen in the past, as ACES 3.5 (aka SloanSpace) does provide this.

Gilbert's effort looks pretty nice, but I do have some questions about it, i.e. how much of what I'm looking at is templated vs. built in?

My personal preference is for a standard templated package to provide lean and sparse output that can then be built on when customizing sites (making more use of the template system's ability to use master/slave chains, includes, etc in order to make it easy to whack away at look and feel in a handful of places rather than page-by-page through the system).

I didn't play around enough to see if it allows image and other attachment uploads, unthreaded as well as threaded bboards, etc.

One thing to recognize, though, is that no group of people larger than three or four are ever going to agree on look and feel and feature set for a bulletin board package.  That's why I don't mind our having two to choose from.  In many ways having separate packages to meet differing sets of opinions regarding "the perfect bboard" makes a heck of a lot more sense than trying to write a single uber-bboard that fits everyone's taste and preference.