Posted by Jason Erdahl on December 22, 2006 at 3:23pm
Hello -
(2) modules we are looking to create/modify from existing in early 2007 are a WIKI module and a commenting/forum module.
For the WIKI module, I've seen the Liquid WIKI project, and we're certainly going to try it out, but am interested if anyone else has tried it or used something else.
For the commenting/forum module, we'd like a way to merge our forums and comments into one engine, allowing forums by topic as well as commenting on certain site elements, integrated into one module. Ideas?
Thanks much, and Happy Holidays to all.
J
Comments
Try playing with Views
Views is a wonderful critter, and let's you create "forums" (actually lists of nodes in a forum like view) that don't have the same limitations as Drupal's forum module (for example, in our case, we have a lot of discussions that would span more than one category).
By "commenting on certain site elements," do you mean stuff within Drupal, or across non-Drupal content as well?
Yes, we're looking at,
Yes, we're looking at, perhaps, using AJAX to call the comment results from story pages on startribune.com, as well as have a block to submit a comment about these stories into the Drupal comment/forum module.
Nice idea on the views - we hadn't thought of doing that.
J
Oh, Ajax!
We didn't even think of that.
We built a custom content type with CCK, then coupled that with the prepopulate module to build a comment iframe that sits on all our stories. When the page is built, some non-Drupal PHP one of our programmers built checks the Drupal database to see if the story already has comments (our stories all have unique ID numbers that get put into the CCK table for that content type when somebody posts an initial message) - if it does, the PHP displays the five most recent linked comments, if it doesn't, it displays the comment iframe.
Two issues for us: The difference between nodes and comments (we could have just built a system to auto-generate a node for each article, but that would likely mean hundreds of empty nodes over time) - and the whole authentication issue (which we never really cracked, which is why we ended up using prepopulate and an iframe).
Actually, a third issue that's now coming up: Spam. Spammers have already figured out our forms, including the "hidden" variables (such as the field for the ID number, which the user doesn't see). As far as I can tell, the spam module doesn't work with our CCK pages (if I'm just doing something wrong, though, somebody please let me know!).
Ajax as a commenting tool
We've been experimenting with the Ajax approach. Ken wrote a simple non-Drupal demo that relates strings of comments to any arbitrary URI, and our (non-Drupal) CMS team is polishing up an internally releasable version that will enable commenting on stories that are published as static HTML files.
We also ran into a problem with spam
We are using the headline as a key to link Drupal comments with our main CMS, and spammers found that script. We've (at least temporarily) stopped that by doing a referrer check in the PHP script that generates the new Drupal nodes so that it only accepts input from our main CMS domains. Waiting to see how long it takes them to figure that out and spoof the headers!
I am experimenting with
I am experimenting with Using CCK and CCK-Subforms as a way to create Wiki like system for my site. I am thinking this will allow me to create WikiPage content -type with Wiki-Sub-content-types using the sub-forms modules.
Sarvi