Forum OpenACS Development: General Comments and subsites

[This is a transcript of three emails by me and Michael Steigman]

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Hi Pascal,

I'm trying to get the general comments package working with some domain based subsites and, seeing as how you were the porter, I thought I'd check with you on a few questions I had (though I'm using Oracle). I guess my first question would be is it possible to set up the above without doing any hacking? I looked at the data model and some of the procs and it doesn't look like the package is subsite aware yet I've heard from some that GC works on subsites if you mount GC under each subsite. I don't see how that would work though.

If there is no subsite support, was there a reason for that decision (other than lack of time)? I ask because it doesn't *seem* like it would be too tough to add subsite support (though I haven't looked at static pages). Also, as I was looking through the procs file, I noticed some deprecated procs that look like they contain the remnants of some subsite support. Is that what it looks like?

Thanks.

Michael

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Hi Michael,

On Thu, 2002-04-11 at 17:48, Michael Steigman wrote:

(The delay was because I was on vacation)
>I'm trying to get the general comments package working with some domain
>based subsites and, seeing as how you were the porter, I thought I'd
>check with you on a few questions I had (though I'm using Oracle). I

I'm afraid (check the date stamps) that most work I did is nearly one year old. The porting I did works for PG but is not 100% (the content-repository wasn't done back then), and the Oracle code was never updated. Sorry. I changed employers and that left me without time to do more on 4.x.

IIRC, subsite stuff does indeed _not_ work for GC, feel free to take over the work if you want to.

Regards,
- Pascal.

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Thanks for getting back to me, Pascal. I figured you might be on vacation.

I noticed that the code still uses the acs-message interface (whereas Jon Griffin mentioned in a bboard posting that GC should call the CR API directly). Your comment explains why that is. After looking over the code, I made a few changes and created a bug and patch at:

https://openacs.org/sdm/one-baf.tcl?baf_id=1478

If you have time to give it a test, I'd love some feedback. As far as the rest of the unfinished work is concerned, if you can recall any more particulars about what was generally agreed upon or desired for the data model and pages, I can probably work on that stuff (time permitting). Thanks.

Michael

I'll take a look at the patch.  Also, I did some clean-up work on general comments late last year.

Good to hear from you, Pascal, we miss you :)

I am unclear about what is the user/application requirement for a sub-sites enabled GC package. I guess I thought users cannot tell where (or how many) GC packages are mounted, nor need they care. In our site, the comments are like attachments to the underlying object they are referring to. No?

Please broaden my view. TIA.

Regards..

I guess I thought users cannot tell where (or how many) GC packages are mounted, nor need they care. In our site, the comments are like attachments to the underlying object they are referring to. No?

I think you are right, though the "view details" link in the comments display of the current implementation *does* need to know where GC is mounted. The main reason I started hacking GC, though, had nothing to do with displaying comments - it was because I could not get the "Add a comment" link to work correctly with subsites (both the garden variety and domain based). While I was at it, I thought it'd be nice to have the ability to create discrete GC instances. I am planning to set up a single OACS installation with domain based subsites and I'd like to be able to delegate the management of comments on different sites to different people. I guess that would be the requirement, in answer to Roger's question. Does that make sense?

So the impetus behind the patch was to correct the general_comments_package_url proc, which was just wrong. The package_id/subsite stuff just seemed like low-hanging fruit. It was basically modeled on what I saw in the News package.