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honestly... how hard can it be?
#1

[eluser]ICEcoffee[/eluser]
Ok, so off the bat I admit I'm a bit of a noob, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, so pls keep that in mind as you read on.

I am currently developing an teaching/instructional web application. I need to integrate a forum. I don't need a feature rich forum, but I do need to be able to add custom fields, for example....

A users creates a new post, in which the user is seeking advice. Let's assume people reply to the post. The OP'er can then rate the reply as to how useful the reply was. This 'rating' system is a CORE feature of the web app.

I looked in the Codeigniter wiki, and seen 'Freak Auth + Vanilla forum', but looking through the notes, I'm not sure I can include my 'rating' features, so I started to think, how difficult could it really be to 'roll-my-own' non-flat-file, but simple forum?

Experienced developers here may be laughing out loud right now at the audacity of my initial question, but would someone kindly summarise what I would need to consider?
#2

[eluser]Xeoncross[/eluser]
Every good project starts with a dream and a desire. Shame on anyone that laughs at that.

The closest I have ever seen is Over at P2L. Other than that you can browser around and find stuff or download some of the simple forums out there to see how they work.

Personally, I plan on making one some time soon as I only need basic posting/editing/admin and something bloated like vB just gets in the way of pure forums like the kind on wordpress.org (bbpress.org).

Anyone want to build a micro forum like "beast" (500 lines) for CI? Wink


EDIT:
Also, I recommend that you use Redux Auth lib if you build your own forum as it is the best/cleanest/fastest user system I have seen to date - and would save you 30% of total time if you built your own forum.
#3

[eluser]usmc[/eluser]
[quote author="ICEcoffee" date="1219352503"]Ok, so off the bat I admit I'm a bit of a noob, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, so pls keep that in mind as you read on.

I am currently developing an teaching/instructional web application. I need to integrate a forum. I don't need a feature rich forum, but I do need to be able to add custom fields, for example....

A users creates a new post, in which the user is seeking advice. Let's assume people reply to the post. The OP'er can then rate the reply as to how useful the reply was. This 'rating' system is a CORE feature of the web app.

I looked in the Codeigniter wiki, and seen 'Freak Auth + Vanilla forum', but looking through the notes, I'm not sure I can include my 'rating' features, so I started to think, how difficult could it really be to 'roll-my-own' non-flat-file, but simple forum?

Experienced developers here may be laughing out loud right now at the audacity of my initial question, but would someone kindly summarise what I would need to consider?[/quote]

How hard can it be? Famous last words. Smile

Have you looked at Moodle? http://moodle.org/
#4

[eluser]Randy Casburn[/eluser]
I'm not sure the coding part is necessarily your problem. The answer to "how hard can it be" comes down to the "how big is the feature set".

"So how hard can it be?" How do you want your ratings displayed? Numerically? Boring... Bar Chart? Better. JavaScript Sliders...Cool! You just went from way simple to way complex for one feature in less than a second.

As an example, one of the biggest problems you'll have is integrating an editor and deciding what capabilities (features) you'll want to provide your OPs. That may seem ridiculous right now...that's OK. I'll forgive you until you've gone through this.

Just consider this simple feature:

Quote:he said...she said

or this one

:-)

and the merry-go-round goes around and around and where it stops...

There are many pre-built capabilities that can be hacked and many of them have built in "voting" capabilities and rating features already. It may be wise to investigate one of those.

Or, jump on in and help Xeon build his!

We'll all help.

Randy
#5

[eluser]ICEcoffee[/eluser]
Quote:Just consider this simple feature:

he said...she said

Ah, the 'ol "quote" feature. Well... I guess if I did code or joint code a forum, functionality would obviously be top priority. Ajax controls etc or HTML editor could come second. And I certainly couldn't do worse than the functional, albeit basic, forum as available with Drupal.

Given that codeigniter doesn't have a forum module, I think it might be fun to consider teaming up with some folk and building a basic forum. Nothing fancy, no auth/acl, just a basic forum.
#6

[eluser]Xeoncross[/eluser]
[quote author="Randy Casburn" date="1219356491"]
Or, jump on in and help Xeon build his!

We'll all help.[/quote]

I have the "ultimate" tagging lib to finish first.

(I know, I know...)
Quote:Famous last words

;-)

Quote:Given that codeigniter doesn’t have a forum module, I think it might be fun to consider teaming up with some folk and building a basic forum. Nothing fancy, no auth/acl, just a basic forum.

Yes, the admin area is what scares me. I mean, how many controls do you want to give mods/admins? That is what takes time. You could just do a simple delete/edit page for posts/topics or you could go nuts with features.

The auth could be knocked off by Redux in a snap as it plugs into any type of system. I built the world's only(?) Curl Akismet class so that would help keep spam down low. Then you just need a "posts" and "forums" db table and the validation class can take it from there.

Also, if we use plugins (like my hooks upgrade) then people could add to the system whatever they want.

Like the WYSIWYG editors could be enabled with a call to
$this->hook->call('textarea');
#7

[eluser]ICEcoffee[/eluser]
@Xeoncross:

checkout Drupal's forum (if you are not familiar with it already), that'll give you an Idea at what I am looking at to start off with. The 'new post/edit' class need only be a basic form with basic HTML controls, and I'd be happy.

The other reason for keeping something very basic (apart from my skill level), is that it would be easier to provide hooks for people to, well... hook on their own auth/acl etc, assuming I deciding to go the 'roll-your-own' route and give it to the Codeigniter community, which I would be happy to do.




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