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(Using Vanilla to realize comment-feature like seen on e.g. youtube ! # 1)
Greetings
eugen
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The only change I could see needed is perhaps moving the comments box to the top?
That's how I do it, (without the comments box at the top).
<iframe src="http://example.com/forum/<?php print $thread_id; ?>"></iframe>you could store the equivalent thread ids in your cms, or you could do a lookup against the vanilla discussion titles or something. you could even populate the iframe from your cms if the vanilla discussion doesn't exist.
i'd recommend adding a vanilla discussion for each video as it is added to your cms though. so there's always a discussion for every video. you can write a script to create discussions for your existing videos fairly easily...
if you go that route, you should prob'ly use jQmedia to embed the video, maybe some additional info, in the first post of the relevant discussion, so that the comments will make sense from the context of the forum as well as from the video cms page.
Such an add-on would be very well used I'm sure, even with Podcast episodes, or any other similar implementation.
Now we wait and see who bites!
1-5. Works this way but the behind-the-scenes mechanics are different. Janine makes a new table in Vanilla that matches IDs with "associated" discussions, that's all. The associated discussions can be forced into one particular category (or the category can be made to match the category of the blog post) but that's just user sugar that makes no difference to Janine. From a user's point of view the effect is the same as what you describe.
6. I don't quite understand what you want here. Do you mean that the Vanilla extension should modify the Video CMS database to publish comments there? That sounds tricky. Or would the Video CMS call on the Vanilla extension to display comments in the format of the Video CMS? That sounds easier and safer, though it might work better as a separate extension. Or could probably even get away with a call to comments.php inside an <iframe> tag and do all the reformatting you want in CSS, though this would leave a lot of HTML cruft in your pages.
7. This is Janine's biggest failing right now. What you describe is the correct way, what Janine should do. Instead, Janine automatically creates the new discussion with a starter comment when anyone hits the link you described in 5. This is bad because it means spidering web bots can create discussions in your forum just by following the links.
The other big problem with Janine is that it includes all of the CMS interface code in the extension. That's bad because adding support for any new CMS (or fixing bugs in an existing interface class) requires a new package for all Janine users to download. This flaw combined with the above flaw is leading me to write an entirely new extension that will replace Janine, called Affinity.
But Affinity is a multiple-step process. The first step was Set List (because I hate writing form controls). The next step is some kind of CMS connector class.
But yeah, it's the same philosophy behind Janine, namely, "I already have a forum, why do I need a comments module on my CMS?"
But that's the thing... you're the first person I've ever seen ask for this feature. I just don't think there are many people eager to run their own video CMS. The bandwidth costs alone would strike dead most mortal men.
The trick here is to break up your system into smaller features, each of which could have other practical uses. For example:
- An extension to automatically create a Vanilla discussion that is linked to a post on a CMS. I know for a fact that several Vanilla/Wordpress users want this and at least one guy asked me to adapt it to MediaWiki as well.
- A theme that displays a bare-minimum version of comments.php. Useful for anyone who wants to embed a Vanilla discussion into another web page.
- An extension that lets you pick from any installed theme on the fly when displaying a Vanilla page. Closely related to #2 but sounds like it might have a bunch of other cool, non-obvious uses.
Put these together and you have a generic system for using Vanilla as an all-purpose comment system for just about any kind of CMS. It solves your problem, and it grabs the interest of a much wider set of Vanilla users.Someone else please correct me if I'm wrong. I may have tunnel vision from working on Janine/Affinity.