DiscussThis!

by Will M on 01 Oct 2006 11:54 PM

The first day of the Modular Developers Conference I had the pleasure of eating lunch with Scott McCulloch, Kelly Ford and Peter Donker. At one point Peter says, "Your forum really needs...". He went on describe all the functionality that is built into the DiscussThis! add-on module for Active Forums, but never released. This weekend I pulled out the code to see where I left off with the module. It worked without any problems. That being said, it still needs some cosmetic work, but it's functional.

What is the DiscussThis! Module? Well, it's small module that you can add to any page and allow people to "discuss" some aspect of the page using the Active Forums engine. For example, you may have a gallery module and want to use Active Forums to discuss pictures in the gallery. Add the DiscussThis! module to the page, specify a few settings and you are ready to go. Another option could be to use it to discuss products in an e-commerce applications. Basically, you can discuss anything that is on the page just by specifying some unique aspect. This could be your TabId, ModuleId or any other parameter in the URL.

If you are a current Active Forums customer and would like to be a beta tester, please email support [ at ] activemodules.com.

Will Morgenweck
Active Modules

1 Comments for DiscussThis!

Robert Axford User is Offline

20 Dec 2006 08:36 PM

Here's my take on this... I've previously already proposed this very idea, but here it is again seeing as it is now actually on the table.... hurrah!

The point of this functionality is essentially to provide commments (in the form of discussions) and ratings to any page or module, using existing forum code rather than duplicating code all over the place with comments and ratings in every module. Personally I believe there should be a core provider for this, but the chances of that every happening are pretty slim so I'm all in favour of this module.

The AF forum viewer goes some way towards providing a way to add comments and rating to any page, but it is too big and clumsy and one has to create the forum for each instance in advance.

I may be getting way ahead, but what I'd really like to see from this module is something that can be included, not only in any manually created page, but also in ones created on the fly by modules such as Scott's Simple Gallery. It could be configured to display either just a 'discuss this' link, or more information such as the current rating, how many comments there are/popularity, the last comment and so on.

It would create threads on the fly as needed and these threads could perhaps be set to display or not display in the main forum instance. Meaning.. even though they'd use the forum code, they might not have to be visible in the primary forum instance.

Another way to think of it is to be able to effectively 'inject' a small selection of AF functionality anywhere on the site.

Just my 2 cents,
Regards,
Rob

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