[dev] Agora Code and Idea Donation

[Stephan Hohmann]

Hello there,

I'm stuck with a half-finished forum software weighing around 13,000 lines of
code. Since the original dev team has split up, I see no point in  
continuing development on my own. However, I believe some of the  
features might be
interesting for Agora or even Horde itself:

  o XSL/T Based Template Engine
    We have started with Smarty as our template engine but soon ran  
into problems
    when we decided we wanted XHTML as output format.  It is quite basic at the
    moment and given the decisions regarding XHTML vs. HTML in H4 I do not know
    if it'll fit in... However, it's great for generating RSS and Atom.

  o HTTP Caching
    In an effort to keep server loads as well as traffic costs low, we've
    experimented with HTTP/1.0's Last-Modified and HTTP/1.1's ETag a lot and
    gained some experiences regarding HTTP level caching.

  o Linkbacks
    Finding out how a thread is linked is quite interesting but  
usually requires
    logfile analysis. We wanted a more active approach and keep track  
of incoming
    referrers by the forum software itself. In addition to this, we wanted to
    allow linkbacks via the pingback XMLRPC call as well (and possibly  
trackbacks
    as used by Wordpress). This could be interesting for other modules serving
    community content as well (mostly Wicked and Ansel).
    I had some good ideas to eliminate spam and noise. But there's nothing in
    code yet...

  o Meaningful URLs
    Apart from being pretty, we wanted our URLs to express "is-a," "has-a" or
    subset relations. A nice sideffect: This allows for hackable URLs. I.e.
    you could take away the last segment of a URL (up to the last "/") and
    move up in the logical structure. E.g. /help would point to the  
general help
    while /help/text would be the help page regarding text formatting.
    We used a Chain of Responsibility to achieve this. But I'm certain
    Horde_Routes can do the same.

  o Statistics
    People really love statistics. Generating a list of the most popular forums
    and threads as well as an average on the amount of posts/h is  
quite easy and
    draws some attention, making it a nice-to-have.

I also had some ideas on how to link some existing modules into Agora:
  o Ansel
    Ansel could be used to manage forum avatars as well as provide a one-click
    hosting solution for images.

  o Scry
    Threads with attached polls are a hardly used, yet often requested feature.

  o Trean
    For larger forums, it might be an idea to let users bookmark their  
favourite
    threads. It might be better to let Agore handle this. But since Trean is
    already there...

  o Folks
    Usernames could be linked to profile pages in Folks.
    Personalized statistics on a user's activity in Agora might be another
    nice-to-have.

I could start working on this approx. by the end of the week, so let  
me know if
you're interested.

Have fun,
   Stephan