Erik Moeller-3 wrote:
I just saw that Tax Almanac, a MediaWiki customized by Intuit software, has a very interesting integrated discussion system:
http://www.taxalmanac.org/index.php/Discussion_Forum_Index
It uses normal wiki pages in the "Discussion:" namespace to store the threads, and stores the comments themselves as parametrized templates within these pages. But the user interface looks like any ordinary bulletin board.
I don't see any links to source code and don't expect that it is available. Has someone talked to them about whether they'd be willing to open source it already?
That looks very interesting, and kind of similar to an idea I had myself. I haven't seen the interface yet because I didn't bother creating an account and whilst IPs can view source on locked pages, they can't edit unlocked pages (which is an interesting way round to have it :-).
They seem to be using an extension to provide the "most recent discussions" view, sourced from a particular namespace JOINed with a given category.
I was wondering whether it would be possible to arrange that a given namespace could be set up to work like this from the ground up, rather than spatchcocking it into existing pages...I have no idea, for example, how they manage to prevent ordinary wikicode from messing up their nice orderly conversations.