doddsey_65

Hello again. I know I have been gone for a while but I would like to show you all the new version of the forum. I have kept the old website (and repository) online as a backup and the new site can be found at http://162.243.173.39 (No proper URL yet). It uses NodeJS and Socket.IO to provide a real time experience. As you navigate around (some pages are still missing compared to the PHP version) you will notice there are no page refreshes. This was an important thing for me especially when creating a real time application. When you visit the site you are automatically subscribed to certain events (only 2 so far). These are new topics, and user logins. When a user logs in their name will appear in the online user list automatically. If you happen to be viewing a forum and someone makes a new topic, the topic will also pop in automatically. A new feature I have introduced is the way that new topics and posts are created. When you click the "new topic" button you don't get the usual modal popup. Instead you are taken to a page that resembles the topic. Simply click on the default name and default post body to change it and then click save. I feel this little feature will help with the flow of the site so let me know your thoughts. It is still quite basic and you can't do a lot besides create topics and posts (and login/register) but the core framework is shaping up nicely. I have a lot of new ideas which implement the real time aspect. For example when I implement a friend/follower system. When you login your friends will receive a popup to say that you have logged in, or when you create a new post they will get an instant popup. Or when you mention someone in a post (yup they will get a popup!). These options will of course be configurable for the specific user.

I have started to add some development documentation which can be found on the guthub page http://cjmarkham.github.io/asimpleforum/

Ah poo, forgot to mention that the site had moved. Mentioned it on another forum but must have forgotten about this one. The new address is http://www.asimpleforum.co.uk/forum/

A few hundred replies since my last post and yet no comments or referrals. Am I missing something here? Or are people just not interested?

Just a quick heads up. I have added documentation to the forum in the form of phpDocumentor. This will help those of you wanting to read through the code and understand it a bit more. Or it will do once I have added some comments to my code (never been one for doing this). You can access the docs by clicking on the "Documentation" link on the forum or by going here. The only one that is complete is the small language class located here. From this you will be able to get a general idea of what use this will be. If you want to help with commenting (since its low on my todo list) then you can fork the repo on github, add some comments and then submit a pull request. This would really help (as would some general testing). Thanks

Hi. Firstly I would like to thank everyone who tested that version of the forum. God knows it had it's issues. But, not one for letting a project die, I decided to resurrect it a few weeks ago. I have learnt alot since the last version and the new version is a lot better. If you are interested in testing it can be found at http://staging.asimpleforum.com/. This version uses the PHP framework "Silex" and HTML template system "Twig". Because of this, errors should be kept to a minimum and development will be a lot faster. There are also several tests ran both while coding and deploying. Stuff like grunt and jshint for parsing errors and php unit for unit tests. The code is also deployed via git which means no more FTP errors. I have also implemented caching in 2 forms. The first and default method is disk caching. Data will be encoded and saved in files so they can be accessed later rather than pulling info from the database all the time. The other method is NoSQL. I use mongodb as a caching layer and store information in collections (similar to disk caching method). Feel free to contribute to the site too if you like at the github repo https://github.com/cjmarkham/asimpleforum. The design of the site has been improved a lot and will continue to see improvements as I develop more towards a mobile friendly structure. There is a test account if you don't wish to register. Username: tester, password: tester. Thanks

Forgot to change the last post of the forum when the newest one is deleted. I will get round to it now. should have used htmlentities. topic and post pagination used to be done via ajax, the new topics would be loaded into the wrapper div. I got rid of it but mustn't have made all the needed changes to remove it completely. Thanks

Since i need more indepth testing of the moderator features I will promote the first 10 users who login today. They will be promoted to the BETA testers group. This group will allow you to edit topics and posts. You will be able to test features such as inline editing of topics and posts as well as testing the deletion of posts and avatars. You will also be given the ability to bypass the flood control (only on posts) so you can fully test without having to wait 30 seconds between posts. Thanks

Which address? Changing the page title with the url isnt a major flaw. The post is pulled using the id in the url, the name is just there for SEO purposes, so changing it doesnt really matter.

yeah, that was just a database problem, i ported over the content from my local dev but forgot to change some settings.

The activation of account should now work, ive added some template changes aswell

was just uploading new files, the error is generated when the file is in the process of being overwritten

it was trying to create 2 sessions with the same session id. Ive removed that and everything seems to be working now

still something wrong with the session class. Ive turned off the friendly errors so i can get details on the live site, as this only seems to happen live.

should work fine now. Added a rule in htaccess to redirect all non www to the proper site www.asimpleforum.co.uk