Forum OpenACS Development: Forums or General Comments for comments in projects

You can give comments to tasks and projects in project manager which will show up in a long list of comments, which may or may not be related to each other. Additionally log entries for tasks show up in the general comments section, thereby mixing topics (hour logging and the comment with the comments e.g. by clients).

As an alternative I thought about pushing forums instead. So instead of writing a new comment, you would write a new posting with the option to "categorize" by e.g. starting a new topic. Additionally log entries would be fed into one new thread in the forum.

Each community / customer would have one forum instance. Each project would have one forum. Each task would have one thread in the project's forum, with the context_id of the task. I would add a parameter context_id to the forums-view to allow you to only view the threads with a specific task. All logging would be done in one additional thread.

This would effectively clean up the project view, as you are seeing the threads for the project (as well as comments on tasks, if there are any). Furthermore, you would have one long list of hour commits for a project along with the comments. On the other hand, this "problem" could be taken care of if you would just use logger and not post the logger comments into the task / project comments, but automatically send the comment to those subscribed to hour logging.

Collapse
Posted by Dave Bauer on
What you really want is threaded comments. This is very simple to add to general comments. It does not appear you want to actually make the comments available from the forums UI. The comments really only make sense in context of what they are commenting on.

Since general-comments are built on the content repository is to very easy to set the parent_id to a another comment.

You could base this on contrib/packages/general-comments, which does not use acs-messaging, to simplify the code, and already supports the parent_id in the API at least. (It would be great to finally finish this, and replace the old general comments package with it anyway.)

Amen to that when it comes down to (personal) comments on learning materials: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=578568

For projects it wont work because comments in projects are used for:

1) Commenting on the status of the task (along with hour information)
2) Providing additional information about a task / project
3) Asking questions for clarification

This is why the idea of threaded comments from dave is great, but I have to ask myself, if I have threaded forums, why do I need threaded comments? Isn't this code duplication? I think what would be easiest is if you could say that forum messages can have any object_id as a parent and then rewrite thread-chunk.tcl which takes care of that.