Re: Threaded (subject indented) php forums?

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:18:18 +0100, salmobytes <Sandy.Pittendrigh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm shopping around for php based forum/bulletin board software.
PhpBB is (obviously) popular. But I don't like the linear way its
topic threads
are presented.

In the old days, the earliest forums were files based. File-naming
schemes
could be used so threads could be presented as indented, hierarchical
post lists,
where it was visually obvious that post number 5 was a direct response
to
post number 3, etc. In all the mysql-based forums I've seen so far
each thread is presented as a linear line of responses to a head topic
listing,
where the individual response-to-which-response hierarchy is lost.

Perhaps this has something to do the difficulty sql has in modeling
hierarchical
structures. Regardless, are there any php/mysql based forums out
there, that start off
by presenting a topic list, *BUT WHERE* individual thread histories
are presented
as an indented hierarchy? Maybe I'm just blind. I've looked at
several and haven't found
it yet.

I'm not aware of any packages that do this out of the box, howeve, I've seen comment's which do. So maybe widen your search to check wether you can alter a comments script which does thread to become a forum.

Technically, it's not that difficult, unless you want to be able to delete intermediate posts. Just have a table messages (I would choose the adjacency model, nested sets are not suited for fast/frequent alterations):
id message parent-id
1 foo NULL
2 bar 1
3 foz 1
4 baz NULL
5 fox 2
6 bax 5
7 foy 3
8 bay 3

Resulting in:
1
--2
-----5
--------6
--3
-----7
-----8
4

The main difficulty is displaying: if you want fully 'expanded' thread, you can't escape a resursive function or procedure (either in the script or at the database side). If you choose to show only a certain level of threads, a bunch of self joins as needed are enough.
--
Rik Wasmus
.

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