"feature-rich" commenting implementation
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wolfeman
Joined: 2004-09-02
Posts: 25 |
Posted: Thu, 2005-09-08 20:13
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greetings, I love Gallery 2, I just installed it last night to play around and see what's under the hood and its GREAT! Is there a way to implement a more elaborate commenting module? I'd like to see something along the lines of a "mini forum" so that full discussions can take place within each album. is this just silly-talk? am I crazy for asking about it? <-obviously I've noticed lots of talk about embedding gallery within other environments but what about if I want to embed something, like a discussion board, within Gallery itself? -mw |
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Posts: 32509
i'd say "robust" is the wrong term here.
you want a more "elaborate" or "featurerich" commenting module
of course it is possible, but you'll have to find someone who has the time to implement it. it's not that difficult, but it would take a few days.
and if you don't find anyone and you are yourself also not a coder, feel free to add it to the feature request list on http://sf.net/projects/gallery/ , without any guarantees that we will have time to work on it any time soon.
Posts: 25
"find anyone" ?
that's why I'm here.
kthksbye
Posts: 32509
yep, and as a G2 dev I just wanted to inform you that this is
a) possible,
b) not too hard to do, but
c) just one of many many feature requests and probably, the core team doesn't have time to work on it any time soon.
maybe you were already aware of this, just wanted to make these points clear.
Posts: 25
I appreciate the fact that no one has time for every request and that time=$$ and no one is forking over any at the moment, however, if you or someone else could take brief moment and point me in the right direction and provide some hints, like where in the G2 code would I look for the parameters governing comments and what kind of things can I do to invoke threading and quoting, that would be very helpful to someone like me who has very limited experience with coding.
I did take quite a bit of time myself in reading up on custimization and modules and I am able to edit themes and embed headers/footers/sidebar on G2 without too much trouble.
Any information along with links to existing information would be greatly appreciated.
-mw
Posts: 32509
First off, a threaded forum adds some complications compared to a flat forum.
e.g. the comments count. when the forum is flat, as the comments module in G2, you can count the nr of comments per item easily.
if the forum is threaded, it gets much more complicated and you'll have to do something similar to the views count we have for albums / items.
or you follow the approach of other threaded forums, like fudforum or the old ubb threads.
but let's forget about the comments count for a moment.
what is needed to change the comments module to make it work as a threaded forum module?
- Show the comments in a threaded fashion (ShowComments.inc), maybe copy the user interface from a proven forum, like fudforum.
- Offer an "Add comment" link for each comment, such that you can create threads
- In AddComment.inc, in $comment->create($itemId); set the $itemId to its parent comment (in ShowComments.inc / ShowComments.tpl, you'll have to add a comment.AddComment link/url with itemId = parentCommentId or something like that)
- handle the comments count somehow (classes/GalleryCommentHelper.class ), this won't be trivial
Posts: 25
I like the "add comment" link idea a lot actually and that would suffice for my needs, to hell with traditional threading. That would give it a very nice blog-esque feature. Great idea, although i'm still a bit confused as to how to impliment that based on your pointers above since its unclear if all the steps you list are required to simply add an "add comment" link to each comment.
Posts: 32509
sure, you can just add the "add comment" link to each comment that is listed below the photo. but without a lot of other changes, it won't result in a threaded comments / forum thing. the new comment would just be added at the top of all comments, flat, no threading.
Posts: 25
I can't see much point to that and it pretty much does that anyway when you add a new comment
it would need to be threaded.
so does that mean one would need to follow all your steps from the previous post, including screwing with the "classes/GalleryCommentHelper.class" ? [which doesn't sound fun at all]
Posts: 16504
You might want to take a look at osnews.com to see how they've done it using the flat layout, but still being able to click on a link to get the replies that have been made to a post.
Posts: 25
thanks, I'm looking now but I do not see any sign of a gallery installation on the site you listed.
can you give me a direct link to the example you wanted me to look at?
Posts: 16504
They don't have a gallery install afaik. I was mearly talking about their forum and how it's setup as a possible idea to use instead of trying to pursue the true threaded comments.
I've seen a lot of boards that had threaded comments and they are usually very hard to follow because after 2 or 3 comments they start compacting so much or trailing off the page because most sites are setup for 800px wide.
Posts: 132
I think this deserves some attention. Are anyone interested in something like this beside me?