Re: Forum hacks

Tomas V.V.Cox wrote:

On Wednesday 17 October 2001 01:37, Morgan Christiansson wrote:

Tomas V.V.Cox wrote:

Hi, I was working a little in the Pear DB support for Forum, it works but still need some reviews. Are there too much problems if we only leave Pear DB as the only DB layer? (could simplify a lot the task of maintaining this sutff).

Great, i bareley received any help at all to my forum project so it's nice to have some contributions. :)

Pear Forum is a great contribution and at least for me, a need :)

How about using different queries for different SQL servers? How does this work with PEAR DB, i suppose it could be done with if clauses but it messes up the code a bit at least it does that in phorum 3 it's very hard to follow execution IMHO.

My plan is too use standar SQL92 syntax and the queries used by Forum isn't complex, so it would work good with all backends. A collegue has written the table definitions for PostgresSQL and today I'll test it support. I'll think a cleaner method than "if" if need some SQL adaptation. But, you agree on using Pear DB as the prefered DB layer? (of course if I finally get a good support)

Ok, does SQL92 include subselects, and how good/bad is subselect's for performance?

Also, caching could be done in the DB layer, brian (phorum creator) wrote a great article/presentation about this here: http://dealnews.com/apachecon/

Wouldn't it better to cache the hole HTML?

Read my other mail.

What I would do next is work in the Template/skin system. The actual system need to "program" the templates thing that I find a little complex comparing with the easy of a traditional template engine. I'll change that to use a real template engine if nobody has problems. My question is ... what class to use? ITX, Smarty, TplFoo1, TplFoo2? (I really don't want to start a flame war here :).

Actually i like the way it's done now, it's very flexible and would also allow template engines to be used, however i think that it needs to be rebuilt a little.

I'll return to tihs topic in the future (after build my first skin :)

Other things I'm missing is to a system to pre-validate posts, is there something done in this area?

Nothing to little is done in that part.

A moderator user type should be needed (can delete posts) and moderator forum type also (where messages needs to be approved first or not). So the moderator will see all the messages with a mark of some kind when a post needs to be approved. Also would be a good moment to introduce the "new" message mark. What do you think?

Yeah, i was thinking about having a skin that has a few extra links if the user is logged in as an admin. And all skins wouldn't be required to have these links.

Tomas V.V.Cox