omat's profile - activity

imo, setup script should not just copy a standard file, but let django-admin build the file, because its format changes from version to version. also secret key is randomized. then add askbot specific attributes to the settings file. maybe we should open a separate question to discuss this.

with this hack i am able to install and run askbot on my local machine (mac os x) with postgres but on server (ubuntu) i am getting `SettingNotSet: ("Startup error, couldn't load USER_SETTINGS.EDITABLE_SCREEN_NAME", None)`. any ideas?

with help of signals and django contenttypes maybe applications can be unaware of the community moderation features, but still those tools can control content of those applications. lets think about this a bit.

To deploy multiple instances on the same machine - just install askbot (the app itself without the settings.py, etc) - in one place, e.g. in your site-packages, then create multiple deployments (with startforum script).

You do not need multiple copies of askbot code to run many sites on the same machine, but a separate copy for development - is a very good idea.

For multiple sites (each with their own domain) you'll have to use separate databases. In addition, there is no support at this time to run multiple forum instances on the same site (domain). That is you can have two forums cars.example.com and trucks.example.com, but not (at least right now) example.com/cars and example.com/trucks (you can of course have example.com/trucks separately). Is this a significant limitation? What do you think?

Just my opinion - but I think it would be more interesting to develop the forum so that it can support many topics (Yahoo Answers is an example here) rather than have a separate forum for each topic (like Fog Creek does at their Stack Exchange).

From the technical standpoint, having a separate set of tables for each forum sounds like an overkill. Alternatively, you can have a "topic/forum" field in each row to accommodate multiple forums in one set of tables. Are you going to share tags or not? Sometimes you can have a question that fits more than one topic - then if you have separate forums it may become technically difficult to automatically share the question.

My preferred solution though is to use tags in a more advanced way to allow clustering of data into a smaller set of topics. For example there may be a hidden set of special tags, maintained by the moderators.

It would be nice to figure out a practical way to support topic segregation, maybe use some simple solution which can allow progressing towards a more evolved one in the future.

How about approaching this not as integration of a single "poll" application but a problem of being able to add new applications to askbot infrastructure that would take advantage of community moderation features? Then the problem boils down to: http://askbot.org/en/question/130/modularity-and-extensibility-of-askbot

With Django it is easy to build an application, be it a blog, poll, photo gallery, etc. Instead of concentrating on the flow of one specific application, we can concentrate on separating the community feature like reputation, badges, tagging, etc. and make them work with different content applications. This way anyone that can build a basic Django application can have their own applications in their own ways.

cheers.

what is the best way to maintain multiple askbot instances on one server? isolated code & db or same code & db using django-sites? is the later possible to implement with the current status of askbot?

i know it may depend on the requirements but having a single db would have the additional advantage of building an aggregate site like StackExchange on top of all sites more easily.

best.

for the db part, with postgres, i couldn't syncdb, i am getting `DatabaseError: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block`. for sqlite, after a few fixes in users.py and tag.py it is running fine too, except for the full-text search.

fyi, i have been using askbot locally with django 1.2 for a day, i didn't test every functionality but it is running fine so far.

Hi there,

edit: regarding askbot being designed as a standalone application - actually it's not a goal, there's no plan to keep it "closed up" this way. The login application will be the first one to be decoupled.

I don't want to "go overboard" in splitting out components too fast (although you are bringing valid points), because in practice too much redo at once often leads to chaos.

But that said, your suggestions sound interesting. Maybe you will be willing to add those features? If you do - please maintain migrations and test cases.

i have been working on a generic reputation application: http://github.com/teknolab/teknolab-django-reputation once it is mature enough i can try to integrate it with askbot. same for tagging: http://github.com/teknolab/teknolab-django-tagging

hi all,

from the organization of code, it seems to me that askbot is designed as a standalone project, which is good as a turnkey solution. but if it is to be used as a part of a larger project there may be problem due to non-core functions (tagging, authentication, reputations, etc.) being tightly coupled.

what would you think of having apps like authentication, reputation management, tagging, etc. as separate applications that can be used out of the box, or can be replaced by existing solutions in a larger project?

cheers.

thanks for the update. still it is not possible to install askbot at first place via pip or easy-install if mysql is not setup in the environment. i couldn't find where this requirement comes from but an `EnvironmentError: mysql_config not found` is raised.

Agreed, indeed more databases should be supported and testing on postrgres is on a todo shortlist.

Askbot now works on postgres. Thanks for bringing this up.

edit: also full text search with ranking by relevance is now working in postrges.

thanks evgeny. i would like to test for django 1.2 but i couldn't install askbot without the dependencies and simply copying did not work due to dependencies too. i will let you know if i can manage to get it running.

on my local environment i have django1.1 and 1.2 but i favor 1.2 for new projects. postgres as the db back-end. i am on mac os x and couldn't even install mysql via pip.

how about leaving full text search to sth. like solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) ?

thanks. good to hear that. i am using postgres.

why is mysql required to get askbot up and running? why doesn't it support all the database back-ends supported by django?

most people, like myself, have already their version of django and database system setup in their development environment. i think those should be excluded from the requirements.

cheers,

omat