Flex Wiki As Threaded Message Board

Summary

The FlexWiki community has tried to hold discussions using existing features, referred to as ThreadMode. This is less than satisfactory, as time reference and context are not always retained. Additionally there is no integrity of the message itself, which tends to move discussions to the various maillists.

It is entirely possible to make FlexWiki run a fully threaded message board. each message would be an individual topic and would only be editable by the wiki administrators (and the original author, if authenticated). Anonymous editing of previously saved message would not be possible. Messages would threaded as in GeekLog nested mode. There would be visual indicators to show that a message is subordinate to a parent message.

Each topic would have a name based on the date-time of message creation, but the post title would come from the 'Title' property. If replying to a previous post the 'Title' property would pre-populated, could be be revised by the post's author.

Each post would contain the list of all messages in the thread hierarchy that this post is subordinate to. This will help the wiki administrator if it becomes necessary to remove a portion of a thread and all related messages.

Posts would be entered in a webpage form that is dedicated to creating forum posts. This webpage would communicate with the wiki via the EditService web service. The webpage would have a field for the post title, pre-populated if replying to a previous post, and a textarea field to contain the body of the post created by the author. All other content in the form of FlexWiki properties would be added by the webpage and not editable by the posts author. The creation and testing of this form is essentially all that is required to get a forum running in short order. This is made possible through the existence of the EditService.

The other elements that are required are some WikiTalk to select and format the forum output and a bit of CSS to make it look pretty. Preliminary versions of both have been created with the results viewable at ForumTest

The files that were used were:

The WikiTalk used to drive the selection and output of the forum is:

@@GetNodes().Collect { each |ShowEntry(each)}@@


:GetNodes:{namespace.Topics.Select{ each | 
				each.Keywords.Contains("Forum1")}.SortBy{each | each.GetProperty("ParentThread")}
}

:ShowEntry:{entry |
[["@@Presentations.ContainerStart(\"div\",", "\"", entry.Name, "\",", "\"",
		["Depth0", "Depth1", "Depth2"].Item(entry.GetProperty("Depth").AsInteger), "\")@@"].ToOneString, Newline,
"!!!!", entry.GetProperty("Title"), Newline,
		entry.Name, " - ", entry.LastModifiedBy, " ", 
		entry.LastModified.ToLongDateString(), entry.LastModified.ToLongTimeString(), 
		Newline, entry.GetProperty("_Body"), Newline,
"+Reply to this+", Newline,
["@@Presentations.ContainerEnd(\"div\")@@"], Newline,
"----", Newline]
}

The CSS is also fairly minimal, until somebody wants to get more fancy, but it is functional:

DIV.Depth1{
margin-left: 4em;
}

DIV.Depth2{
margin-left: 8em;
}

If anyone has feedback, especially concerns that I have not addressed, please come forward now. I will start work on the webpage probably Thursday.

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