Re: Suggestions for GSoC idea: A new Plone Message Board

Hi,

As someone who's worked on Ploneboard, I have a couple of thoughts on this
subject that may be useful:

 1) Building a good, user friendly UI is quite difficult. Plone's standard
content type metaphors only partly lend themselves to this. I would look to
see if there is anything reusable, e.g. some generic forum plugins for
jQuery or .

 2) Are we sure we want to store the message content in the ZODB? Or even
in Plone? The answer is probably yes, but I know for a fact that Ploneboard
had huge performance problems with large forums. Dexterity will make it
better, but not necessarily good enough. If you don't understand what a
_p_jar is, find out. :) I would also look to see if there are ways to make
it possible to optionally store message content in a relational database.
Ploneboard sortof tried to make a set of interfaces that would be generic
enough for this purpose, but since there was never an actual implementation
I doubt it worked out.

 3) I'd look at Discourse as much as possible and figure out what it's
doing well. Most message board solutions out there (e.g. phpBB) really suck
UI wise. Let's make sure we don't copy something that's not actually
working well.

 4) Keep it incredibly simple. I don't think we need threaded replies, for
instance. People will say they do, and maybe a very small number of people
actually do, but please don't over-complicate the UI or the data structures
with this for now. Get it working well with flat replies first. And yes, I
made Ploneboard support threaded replies. It was probably a mistake.

I hope this helps. :) For what it's worth, I think your list of features
looks very ambitious. Try to figure out how to do maybe 1/10th of the stuff
on that list *really well* and then go from there. If you try to do all of
that stuff at once, you'll probably fail.

Martin


On 18 March 2014 15:37, Aman Arora <[email protected]> wrote:

> Yes,
> We are going to implement the message board in Dexterity also using
> plone.app.discussion as the commenting framework.
>
> The idea of 'nested postings' is really a good one.
>
> Thanks
> Aman Arora
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 7:46 PM, Johannes Raggam <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Tue, 2014-03-18 at 14:04 +0100, Guido Stevens wrote:
>> > A number of the features you're listing (rating, notifications,
>> > subscribe, tagging) are generic affordances that are useful also
>> > outside of a message board. Specifically they're on the PloneSocial
>> > and PloneIntranet roadmaps and will be worked on this year. At this
>> > stage they're still vaporware but I'd be interested to explore the
>> > possibilities of designing and architecting this in a way that does
>> > not complicate your project, yet at the same time is able to leverage
>> > possible synergies.
>>
>> +1
>>
>> also: "recent" and "statistics".
>>
>> i guess you're going to implement the board in dexterity, as like the
>> old one was implemented in archetypes, are you?
>> another use case would be "nested postings" besides the "flat" one,
>> including a threaded-view. can be easily done via folderish types.
>>
>> i have a hobby project, where i want to migrate an old Postnuke/phpBB
>> based community site to a platform based on Dexterity/Plone. one concept
>> is, that i don't distinguish between content types, but everything is a
>> posting and can get more specific behavior like beeing a topic, an
>> event, a geolocation, etc.
>>
>> like Guido, i'm interested in any synergies.
>>
>>
>> cheers,
>> Johannes
>>
>>
>> > On 18 mrt. 2014, at 13:08, Aman Arora <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > > Hi,
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > I am working for the above project with Timo Stollenwerk. We have
>> > > come up with quite a few user stories and we are wishing for new
>> > > ideas from Plone community.
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > Some of the features we decided are:
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > In addition to rebuilding, the new message board would also consist
>> > > of added features.
>> > >
>> > >       * Voting feature: To rate the comments/replies.
>> > >
>> > >       * Captcha support: For posting of comments/replies.
>> > >
>> > >       * Notifications: Person gets notified through email (if chosen
>> > >         by him) if someone comments on his conversation or replies
>> > >         back to his comment. Also if he is online a flash on screen
>> > >         would notify.
>> > >
>> > >       * User reputation: User's participation in the message board
>> > >         builds up his reputation (some algorithm to be thought
>> > >         upon).
>> > >
>> > >       * Subscribe: Logged in user can subscribe to any member to get
>> > >         notified about that member's participation in the area where
>> > >         he has access to view. Also one can subscribe to an existing
>> > >         conversation.
>> > >
>> > >       * Recent: A list of recent comments/conversations/topics
>> > >         happening on message board.
>> > >
>> > >       * Interesting: Rich text editor (TinyMCE) used for posting
>> > >         comments, user signatures with his conversation/comments and
>> > >         use of smiley's in comments/conversations.
>> > >
>> > >       * Statistics: Statistics like comments per
>> > >         day/week/month/year, topics per week/month/year and other
>> > >         such data to be available to members.
>> > >
>> > >       * Search: Members can search for comments and replies in a
>> > >         conversation and for conversations under a topic. Specific
>> > >         search through statement '<type> by <user-name>' where types
>> > >         are "Topics"/"Conversations"/"Comments".
>> > >
>> > >       * "Important" tag: A member can mark comments in his
>> > >         conversation as "Important" and will have them viewed at the
>> > >         top separately.
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > Other features include:
>> > >
>> > >       * Categories/Tags for Topics on message board, to ease
>> > >         classification.
>> > >
>> > >       * Reply with quote, feature to quote the comment replying to
>> > >         along with your reply.
>> > >
>> > >       * Maintaining history for member about his comments,
>> > >         conversations and topics started by him.
>> > >
>> > >       * Control: Member can delete some reply from his conversation
>> > >         specifying the reason "spam" or "abusive" or "undesired" to
>> > >         be notified to its author.
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > I have also uploaded my proposal on google-melange and it would be
>> > > great if all mentors can review it.
>> > >
>> > > Looking forward to new ideas.
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > Thanks,
>> > >
>> > > Aman Arora
>> > >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> programmatic  web development
>> di(fh) johannes raggam / thet
>> python plone zope development
>> plone framework  team  member
>> mail: office-//[email protected]
>> web:  http://programmatic.pro
>>       http://bluedynamics.com
>>
>>
>>
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>
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