[dev] Agora Code and Idea Donation

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Stephan Hohmann <webmaster at dasourcerer.net>:

> 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:

Belated, but I wanted to do top-level replies to this thread.

> 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.

I tend to agree with Michael R. here. Do you think it's better for  
RSS/Atom than a dedicated feed library, or something like xmlwriter?

> 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.

This is very interesting to me; I'd love to build some of this into  
the new PostFilter system in Horde_Controller.

> 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 think a lot of the processing could be handled by a queue system.  
But yes, this sort of thing in general is appealing. Content was where  
I was playing with this sort of utility-service module, but really  
these things should be their own services when we sort out how we want  
to do that.

> 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.

Definitely - anything more specific here?

> 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.

As discussed, I like the idea of a horde-wide avatar service better.

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

Definitely.

>  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.

Sure.

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

Anything happening here? :)

Thanks!
-chuck