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Edited by Sam Marshall, Friday, 26 Jun 2009, 17:35

Here's another forum update, but first, an apology - yes these posts are getting old, but it is what I'm working on, so I'm hoping it's of interest to someone... somewhere... somehow...

I could write an amusing anecdote instead... but then I can't post it here because the wrong people might read it! Bad enough that I said in one meeting this week 'this feature is absolutely insane, I'm not doing it, just no' and only then found out that the person who requested it was sitting opposite... smile

So, forum. Well, here's the 'start new discussion' screen. In a refrain which has become depressingly familiar, it looks exactly like the old one.

forumstartdiscussion.jpg

This form basically works now, except for all the features I haven't tested. Hey, those might work too! (Not testing code is sort of the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING!!!! - it's great.)

I don't think I mentioned the technical architecture yet. While it doesn't affect the screenshot above (as you may have guessed, I created the code for this form by copying and pasting all the code from the old version then changing it about), the architecture is quite a lot different.

  • This is a slightly object-oriented design: the main system is contained in classes forum, forum_discussion, and forum_post. All the back-end behaviour is handled in these classes (oh, and forum_cron).
  • Forum types are now plugins and also object-oriented. Types entirely control the display of the 'view' (discussion list) and 'discussion' [not yet implemented] page, although it's expected that they will do this by using base class methods rather than really changing it too much.

One piece of good news this week, if anyone's considering switching to this forum once it's developed: Jenny (the OpenLearn lead developer) told me she's hoping to implement the conversion code so that you can convert a standard forum with all its messages into a ForumNG. Yay!

That's it for now. I'm hoping to start work on the discussion page next week (after I deal with umpteen critical bugs) and brace yourself - it's actually going to look different!

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