Building Forum using CI, mocking ExpressionEngine forum

[eluser]Jon L[/eluser]
I think the ExpressionEngine forum module appears to be effective, light enough, speedy enough, etc, and I also like the default theme used here, so in my spare time I've been working on building up a forum of my own, but completely copying the forum appearance and functionality that you find here in the codeigniter forums. i'm not a designer, which is why I copied the theme appearance, but I'll have a designer redesign the application once I'm finished.

progress
I'd say I'm about 60% complete on the frontend (haven't worked on administrative portion yet), and I haven't built user management yet, though that's next on my to-do.

basic functionality
adding/removing categories and unlimited-recursion subcategories is functioning, as are threads, posts, and replies. i made an enhancement as well, so that when subcategories exist within a given category, they display above the thread list.

posts have properly functioning smileys and bbcode usage.

features
regarding bbcode, I found a user-contributed bbcode helper that I've used as a base, and then I extended it to support quote tags, code tags, and even advanced code tags for special geshi-syntax highlighting (so you can specify code="php", and you'll have php syntax highlighting).

another thing about my bbcode implementation, is that if you try to nest code tags here or in most other forum software, you'll find that nested code tags tend to break. i.e. - {code} stuff {code} nested bbcode example {/code} here {/code}

the proper intended functionality for a nested code tag, is for you to be able to reference the bbcode code tag itself as-is.

my implementation of the code tag parsing preserves nested code blocks without parsing :-)

to-do
I've still got a ways to go. Forum validation, error handling, administration; User component & administration for standalone forum operation; support for integrating the forum software into external applications and using external user tables (i.e. - attach the forum to a CMS or ecommerce software), alternate theme support, etc, but I'm happy with how far I've gotten

underlying code
btw, I've built my forum models in a way that the forum model itself calls upon 2 models, the first is for forum category access, the second is for post access. i've abstracted my models in this fashion so that the category model and post model can possibly be used for other purposes (I'm a huge fan of code re-use). additionally, both category and post models use the Nested Set library by Thunder (heavily modified - it was initially a Model, so I turned it into a Library. also, it didn't use native CI query generation, and there were a few other enhancements it needed, which I implemented).

performance
I'm happy with the # queries used to generate the forum display currently (single-digit queries atm), but I'm also aware that the finished product will obviously cause more queries to be generated, so I won't report on that yet, as it's nowhere near indicative of the final product's performance.

this is my first time building a forum, so scaling will be something interesting to measure as well, when complete.

[eluser]leonglass[/eluser]
Interesting read. I am about to embark on a similar project by adding a forum to one of my existing sites. I am re coding the whole thing with CI while I am at it.

[eluser]Jon L[/eluser]
awesome, i'd be interested to hear about your project as well :-)

[eluser]Phil Sturgeon[/eluser]
Hey,

Me and MrEniro made a clone of this forum some time ago, we got a little further than you but never totally finished it. If I were you id move away from the old idea of making a huge admin control panel, there is no real need for them other than for extra crazy tools like in phpBB with such features as mass-email and auto-prune set-ups.

I'd be tempted to go more in the direction of inline administration, and perhaps any extra features you want admins to have could be thrown in the user control panel. That way you dramatically reduce your coding time, and save admins a crapload of time having to find things in the panel.

When creating the user system you may want to consider something that a few of us said we would start, but never bothered with. If you create an abstract layer for gathering user data, you could in theory use ANY user system. This would be code people would die for, and is the biggest problem we face in sharing pre-made code. Imagine being able to use FreakAuth or any custom system just as easily? If you like the sound of this let me know, im happy to help but im not doing all the code myself :p

[eluser]Jon L[/eluser]
right, an abstract user component layer is what i'm intending, as I'd like this to be completely standalone, and also completely possible to integrate into other systems. any suggestions or contributions you would like to make would be very welcome :-)

[eluser]funkmyer[/eluser]
Hey guys, this sounds great and I hope it's being worked on Based on reading this thread, i guess it's safe to say there is no open-source forum software written for/with codigniter except for the expression engine CMS right ?

[eluser]Jon L[/eluser]
re: existing CMS
not to my knowledge, at least, not a completed project that i've heard of

and technically, i don't even know that EE is open-source or encrypted, so I don't know if it can be included in that categorization :-)


but yes, the forum project is still ongoing in my spare time. cheers :-)

[eluser]funkmyer[/eluser]
cool thanks for the reply. This EE forum is so nice...man i wish i could get my hands on that. Best of luck with this and look forward to when it's completed. Cheers!

[eluser]Derek Allard[/eluser]
EE isn't released under an open-source license (hence, not really "open source"), however all the source code is fully available to you, fully editable by you, and not obfuscated in any way. A personal license for the forum is $50, which is pretty reasonable. If you consider how many days, weeks, and possibly months of work it will save you, I think you'll find its a good investment

[eluser]funkmyer[/eluser]
hell yes!! Who do I make the check out too and where do i go to purchase?!

Thanks!

NOTE: I found it, nevermind.