Okay, I've taken a look at Gilbert's code, and I will be able to reuse some elements, which is a great thing! Thanks Gilbert.
Some points about the above comments:
- editing of messages without versioning? I'm strongly opposed to that. I can't see that ever being a good application. Total flexibility is not always good if you allow features that start to confuse users. If discussions start to get confused by unversioned message editing, the package will not be used as much as it could, because it won't be as useful in fostering useful, long-term-archived exchanges.
- Making each forum its own package. This assumes that little or no aggregation will be done across forums. That you won't ever ask "hmmm, what other crazy rants has Ben posted on OpenACS Evangelization now that i see how nutty he is being on OpenACS Design." Note that, in dotLRN, we are attempting to do cross-package aggregation. It's taken a *long* time to get anything right, and I'm not sure we've finalized that architecture just yet. I certainly don't think we should dabble in that for a core package like bboard. I'm still strongly in favor of multiple forums per package. If there are other arguments, let me know, but killing aggregation is, IMO, not an option.
My proposal for the first version, following the principle of simple design first, iteration later, is as follows:
- forums are objects, scoped to a particular package
- messages are objects, directly associated to a forum (as opposed to indirectly mapped to forums through a third table), not CR items.
- no categorization system yet. I think we need a lot more thought to create a general categorization mechanism. I don't want to create a bogus system to do a bad job of this right now. We can add this later, especially if we design a good, modular categorization scheme.
- two different views: threaded and flat
- revival of features from 3.x: can users create new threads? moderation.
- admins can edit messages in a permanent manner, no versioning. admins can delete whole threads or individual messages.
- ability to post in HTML/text, with toggling after the fact, as that is a display issue and not a content versioning issue.
Note that I wouldn't mind some help on the HTML tag closing stuff! Yes, we really should have a good way to do this once and for all.
