Tonight I finished another feature that I've wanted in POP Forums for a very long time: Inline moderation. Basically, I want to see what's deleted or edited, right in the context of the forum threads themselves. The new version of the app has done that from the beginning, in terms of storing the data, but I couldn't really view it. As of tonight, I can!
One of the things that does become a pain is backward-deploying changes into PointBuzz, because of some customization on the UI side. If it's the class library, no problem, just drop in the new assembly in the /bin folder. But there are UI tweaks, like the single-column topic lists, and wholesale weirdness, like in the news forum where I replace the first "post" with the corresponding news item. Because of those, you can't just replace the files. Fortunately, Subversion does sweet diff comparisons, so I can see in a range of code check-ins what changed, and carefully apply those.
There are two minor features to finish now before I can start my next project, which should go pretty quickly at that point. Designs are more or less done, as is the overall site architecture. Beyond that I have one major feature and one refactoring thing (more Javascript library changes) that I don't need for my sites, but need to get in order before putting up a beta of the source code to download.
It's ridiculous to think about, but this forum version is something I began thinking about four years ago. PointBuzz was coming together with v7.5 of the forum, Visual Studio 2005 was in alpha, and I was starting to move forward with my book. I suppose I don't beat myself up anymore over the time I didn't work on this stuff, because life got a little chaotic starting in 2005.
One of the long-standing issues I've had is the way posts are formatted and parsed, and it has gradually gotten better. Stuff isn't nearly as screwed up on PB now. I've also thought about how there should be some kind of standardization on formatting, maybe storing posts as XML, then using XSL to translate them for display. It's not something I want to think about a lot, but it is on my mind.
I'm really happy with the way this is finally coming along.
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