Questions on Snapboard

[Keyton Weissinger]

All,

First and foremost, thank you all for releasing this work as an open
source project!

I am considering Snapboard for a project I'm working on and would like
to ask a few questions...

1. Can I use Snapboard in the context of a larger app to provide
multiple "boards". I am building a school-based site. Each registered
user is attached to a school. I would like each school to have its own
snapboard. Is this possible?

2. Are there any demo sites out there for Snapboard?

3. Are bugs actively being worked on?

Thank you very much and I look forward to your answers as you have
time.

Best,
Keyton Weissinger

P.S. Please respond to me via email at keyton AT gmail DOT com.

[Julien Demoor]

Hi,

Keyton Weissinger wrote:
> All,
>
> First and foremost, thank you all for releasing this work as an open
> source project!
>
> I am considering Snapboard for a project I'm working on and would like
> to ask a few questions...
>
> 1. Can I use Snapboard in the context of a larger app to provide
> multiple "boards". I am building a school-based site. Each registered
> user is attached to a school. I would like each school to have its own
> snapboard. Is this possible?

There's only one instance of the application per database (that limit is
set by Django), so you can't tie a whole set of boards to one school. If
your project can't be divided in multiple databases (with multiple
instances of Django running on the server), then it's a problem.

You could however create groups of users (one per school) and restrict
access and visibility of their forums. See
http://snapboard.deadpuck.net/docs/permissions.html . This may be a good
solution depending on how many boards you need.

> 2. Are there any demo sites out there for Snapboard?

http://snapboard.deadpuck.net/ but I'm not sure it has the latest
version. You can set up Snapboard in a couple of minutes with a SQLite
database if you want to try it out.

> 3. Are bugs actively being worked on?

Not right now unless there's something serious. I plan on doing more
work on Snapboard in the next months. Most features are working nicely.

Regards,

Julien Demoor

[Keyton Weissinger]

Hi Julien,

Thanks very much for the quick reply. Seems like what you're saying
re: groups might work. I'll take a look at that. My site has only a
single school at the moment, but I'm hoping (and have engineered
everything around) having multiple schools on it. Each would want its
own forum/blog/thingX/etc. Knowing what you do about the code, do you
think it would be possible to create/add a sort of hidden
"super-category" that would represent each school? I'm not looking for
any design spec or for you to do the actual work, just what do you
think?

Thank you again.

Keyton

[Julien Demoor]

You could create a new model to which the (misleadingly named) Category
model would refer. You could use it for navigation and presentation
quite easily. To add access control capabilities to it, I think you
would just need to change Category.can_view(), Category.can_read(),
Category.can_post() and Category.can_create_thread(). I don't know if
the benefit would be worth the complexity of an extra layer of
permissions but it could.

There are three problems I see with the approach I proposed before:

1) There are no per-row permissions in Django's admin site so you can't
have per-school admins as far as Snapboard is concerned (at least not
without writing the views).

2) It takes time to create the categories for new schools. It can be
scripted if they need the same boards.

3) You need to maintain your instances of Snapboard's Group model as
your users are linked to their school. That could be handled with
signals and a model to link groups and schools.

The extra "meta-category" model wouldn't magically solve these issues
but it could help.

Regards,

Julien

[Keyton Weissinger]

Excellent ideas. I will explore and come back around. I really
appreciate your taking time to think on this.

Best,
Keyton