Discourse and Bodega

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday, June 1, 2013 20:27:02 Giorgos Tsiapaliokas wrote:
> Waiting for you comments..

This sounds very, very good and like it is a much better fit than other options 
we had looked at.

Other things I rather like about Discourse (besides the UI being rather nice 
:) are:

* it has a simple accounts system in the postgres database; this will make 
sync'ing the discourse authentication with bodega very simple. Either the 
tables could always be kept in sync with a stored procedure (using something 
like dblink[1]) or Discourse could be modified to authenticate against the 
Bodega db. It probably will be easier to keep the tables in sync, as I expect 
Discourse will be accessing the user table quite a bit, not just for 
authentication.

* similar for setting up categories in discourse: it should be possible to do 
this with a trigger in the bodega db that updates the discourse db.

* the messages are kept in a table using a simple format. this means that 
getting the last N messages for a given asset an showing that in the client 
will be trivial.

as for how to adapt Discourse with its simple category system ... i think the 
cleanest approach will be to have a category for each asset that has a 
partner. i am a little concerned about how this will scale. we'll have to see. 

i don't think we need or want a category for each book in the Gutenberg 
catalog, so it may be necessary to be able to define which assets get forums 
and which don't. this might be as simple as "anything owned by the bodega 
admin partner id doesn't get a forum.

i do wish there was a nice way to link all the forums for assets belonging to 
a given partner in one place. we'll probably need to work around this in the 
participant web app (which, btw, marco has started! :)

so a +1 from me on Discourse, though we should keep in mind that as it is a 
fairly young project with ambitious goals we may need to adjust with it over 
time.


[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/dblink.html


-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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