For some time now I've been working on a commenting module for sasquatch. It was meant to handle commenting of news, polls and right about everything else where you may want a commenting system.

Now I've seen that KaGez is developing a commenting system for the polls...

So, is this really necessary? Won'T it look a bit strange if every section had it very own commenting system? And it would definitely be a lot of code written twice then...

My idea is: Let's just use the one commenting system for everything. The functions I have written were always meant to be used for more than only the news section and can easily be extended to be used for everything else as well.

I'd like to hear your opinion (especially KaGez 'cause he seems to be the only other one working on sasq right now) before I continue to work.

It would be nice to chat with you again, KaGez, because I think that development discussions are a lot easier real-time Alas, due to my work I won't be online during your day except for thursdays!
[addsig]

oh, I'm sorry about that then. I haven't looked into the code too much, so I thought that it'd be only for the news, sorry.
Ofcourse I agree with that argument that it is stupid to code things twice, yes. Anyways, even if we use the same code, we should use different db tables. Reason is easy:
Everytime the poll changes, the old comments will be taken out of the database too. So I'd like to have at least seperate tables for this stuff, but I agree on using the same code for the commenting stuff.
But, here I have a little idea:
You maybe know of our messageboard (aka "Yowie!"). We could maybe also work a bit on this one, and make it usable, and then write a module for sasquatch to use the yowie code for the comments for news etc. How about that? it's just a idea. Ofcourse we can code a extra module for sasquatch only for commenting on polls etc.
Anyways, Yowie will be most probably the same code-design as sasquatch, so we could just let sasq use one of yowie!'s API modules.
And, sure, I wanted to talk to you in IRC all the time, but wondered where the heck you are all the time I'll be in IRC from around 8am-15GMT on workdays, and almost all day on weekends and holidays (except saturdays, cuz that's my GF's day )
So, let's discuss this in IRC. I will freeze the development of the poll until we've reached a good solution. For now I will work on the user module.
C ya in IRC (soon hopefully )
[addsig]

I'll be there on 06/20 (aka tomorrow)

My idea: Let's just compare how the three systems (yours, mine and Yowie!) are working and how they fit into the whole. Then we take the best. I suppose mine would look a lot like the /. comments, don't know if you like that.

Are we going to keep older polls in some archive? If so, we should keep the old comments, too.

One thing that I would prefer the Yowie! solution for, is that we could count the comments as posts then

Anyway, we'll discuss it tomorrow

[addsig]

Sorry, but due to the Soccer World Cup I have decided to work thursday instead of friday...This means, that I won't be able to chat tomorrow. Hope you are online, friday! [addsig]

I'm on almost everyday.
anyways, yowie still doesn't really work
This was my idea about archiving polls:
We take all data out of the DB regarding that poll, and generate a .php or .html file out of it. I'd suggest to use a .php file, and just let it run when somebody calls a old poll. I wanted to disable the old polls, e.g. nobody can vote on them anymore, nor comment them. This way we could just create a .php file which has stored everything inside variables, and generates the archived poll automatically, exactly with the theme the users uses, or code that is inside the archived poll's .php file. This is kinda hard to explain... I'll create a little graphic and text about it if you didn't understand it
Anyways, that's my idea on archiving the old polls.
We'll still have to discuss the commenting stuff tho.
[addsig]

KaGez:
Well, though I did not do much this weekend except for BBQ, drinking beer and watching the soccer WC, I found some time to think about what we discussed in #ypn-dev.

You said it would be against the principle ideas of sasq's modular design if we had one commenting system for every module. Well, I have to agree partly here. On the other hand we have only one db module used by everything else.

So, in my opinion it would make sense to have also only one commenting module. Please consider this: Someone who uses sasquatch and wants to have the commeting feature included in one module needs the code of the commenting module once. If you want two sections with commenting then you don't need the code twice. Would be quite easy to make the commenting module fit into all the other modules. And as we probably want to include the commenting thingy into several places of sasquatch we would save _lots_ of lines of "superflous" code. On the other side we won't have much superflous code if somebody decides to use sasq's commenting feature only in one section.

Also, I still think that it would be good if commenting works (and looks) similar, whereever it is used on the site.
[addsig]

As I said before, I'd love to use 1 commenting API too. But, there is a huge difference between the MySQL and the commenting API. MySQL stuff is easy to generalize, but to be honest, I have _no_ idea how we want to get it done with the commenting API.
OK, I haven't thought about it much up to now, but normally I just have the idea, which isn't the case this time. This doesn't mean that I don't wanna do it, or deny it in any way. I think we should at least give this idea a try.
But, I'd like you to think of a method how we get this working. Not that I'm not interested in it, I am, _hell_ much_. It's just that it'll go faster if one does it, because 2 ppls will just stand each other in their way. So, you can think of a method how we get all these into 1 API. The only thing I _really_ want for this is, that the comments for the poll are not in the same table as the news comments or others. You know the reason
Anyways, I want you to do it, because I'm kinda busy with configuring the server at our school atm. I'll still code on sasquatch, but I think I don't have the time to create big plans atm Maybe in about 1 week, when the vacation starts.
I'd be glad to help you if you're stuck
[addsig]

My idea so far was that the commentign API will contain some lines of code for every module using it. These lines will define everything that is needed to make the commenting fit to the module. This will give us one bigger script to handle this, but it will definitely be smaller than ten totally different scripts for ten modules.

But there will surely be problems. As you said, I'll give it a try. Alas, I don't have very much time right now, neither! Anyway, I'll do it ASAP. [addsig]

As the poll system is one of the few working modules so far, I'd like to test the commenting there. Therefor I'd include a new db dumb testdb because I need a different structure in the table poll_comments. I'll also remove the poll_commenting stuff you wrote. If the testing won'T work I'll restore it from the cvs repositrory.

I hope you're okay with this! [addsig]

ok, happy hacking then!
I'll work on a little CSS script... our current CSS is _far_ too big (7kb already, and we've still got a long way to go). I thought we could split up the current CSS file into it's parts where it is needed, which will get this beast a lot smaller. I still have to think of how we include these things, but I think it is a good idea, since big CSS files lollipop... we could use graphics instead of CSS if we go on like thi
[addsig]

Ok then!

btw, what is this bunch of letters and numbers on the top of the sasq page? Some testing of yours or some kind of error?

Edited:
Hmm...I reloaded and opened it in another browser and the stuff was gone suddenly
Looks like it wasn't such a problem at all...

_________________
--moxx

[ This Message was edited by: MoX on 2002-06-27 18:37 ]

actually, this stuff will be showed once only (unless you delete your PHP caches). Those are the IDs of the caches which have been created. The function which creates the caches outputs that debugging stuff (I will remove it later). Nothin to worry about

Anyways, I've looked at the commenting stuff, and the things for the poll commenting seem pretty much scandisked. Did you already code the part for the poll? It doesn't show me any of the comments from the DB, neither can I post. I get a insertation failure.
And, I have 1 thing I really want you to do. It seems like you always only do a cvs commit after you're done with your stuff, but rarely do a cvs update. If so, please do a CVS update everyday you work on sasq, before starting your work. I'll fix the scandisked files.
Have fun coding!
Btw, another thing:
As you've maybe seen, we're also gonna create a "shoutbox" on the front page. I'll work on this one, and update the sasqdb db dump in CVS in the next few days. If you dunno what a shoutbox is:
http://www.sacah.tk
on the right you should see some "posts". That's a shoutbox.
I'm gonna work on that.
[addsig]

Hmm...Actually I _do_ a cvs update every day, even if I don't work on sasq that day. And if you look at the cvs log files (I'm sure there are some) you'll see that I usually commit several times a day when I'm really working.

In fact I don't cvs update more than once a day usually, because usually you are at sleep while I'm working, and so I can assume nobody has changed anything.

So, which files have been messed up by my behaviour? I modified lots of files including some of your poll scripts to make them work, but I don't know how any other of your stuff should have been messed...I can only imagine that we were working on the same files the same time which will surely cause problems.

The problem with the poll commenting is simple. I changed the poll_comments table.
That'S the reason why I included the new db dump 'test_db'. Now I renamed test_db to sasqdb because it worked perfect. If you use that dumb you should not have any problems any more. [addsig]

ok, I'll take a look at that db dumb
(btw, it's dump ) [addsig]

Hehe...just a typo. I wrote it correctly and incorrectly once in the text above. Did the same typo about hundred times, so I'm always that fixed on not doing it that I do it again and again nevertheless. [addsig]

I fixed it in the CHANGELOG for you
[addsig]

I'm just testing something... [addsig]