Hubzilla Forum View - Phase 1 - Implementation Discussion
I have been talking about retheming Hubzilla and adding additional forum views. I have already started on the new theme and will start working on the forum views soon.
For phase 1 of the forum addon, my goal is to create the following views:
- Forum Topics View - This shows a list of conversations showing the title and summary. You must click on a link to view a forum post. Paginated. (Traditional forum view)
- Forum Post View - This shows an individual forum post and its replies, with nothing collapsed. Paginated for longer discussions. (Traditional forum view)
And retheme the following views:
- Social Media View - The shows recent updates to a conversation, and collapses old replies. (current Hubzilla default)
- Category/Tag View - This shows posts with a particular tag, in social media format. (current Hubzilla default)
- Search Results - This shows posts for a particular search term, in social media format. (current Hubzilla default)
My goal is for users to be able to choose how they consume the content, being able to navigate in both the social media view and the traditional forum view, as well as consume it remotely on their own hub. This could be implemented fairly easily.
I have been playing around with creating addons & modules, and creating these views seems pretty straightforward. Some of the data I need is not in the database and must be extracted from the post itself, but that is doable.
I have ideas on how to do that, but I am definitely open to suggestions. At this point, I am thinking that I will need to create a new table to store the necessary fields, and then just do a JOIN with the existing items table and xchan table to pull everything I need. Then just present that through a template.
If there is a better way, I would love to hear it. And any example code you could throw at me would speed this up. This is my first addon and theme for Hubzilla, and I am still learning how everything works, so be patient.
