What is Forge?

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

Rather than have some lengthy thread develop as 'comments' to your Poll, I thought I would post here instead.

The concept is to draw together various nuke modules as a 'whole' into one page where related items can be seen together?
Nice concept but I am having difficulty grasping the 'how its done'.

Say for example, I am developing a new module, I could link together news items relating to announcements on the prject and als a forum topic for support?

For this concept to work, we would need to allocate a specific news article category for the news posts, identify catID so we could draw the data from the DB into the page - that seems pretty logical to me!

Now we want to pull the data from a forum thread into the page as well.
So, we would need to write something for an admin interface that identifies topic names with its asociated forum topic ID so we can 'select' the correct forum, retrieve that data from the corresponding DB entries and re-display them on the page.

Hmm, very interesting if I am understanding this correctly.

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

Did someone copy your idea?
http://www.metopen.com/project_details-13-MetProjects.html

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1282

Guardian wrote:

Did someone copy your idea?
http://www.metopen.com/project_details-13-MetProjects.html

metopen and I had been in discussions about this several months back. He and I had the idea about the same time, but he was busy on other things, so he was going to wait and see what I ended up with. However, it looks like I took too long. Laughing

Actually, I had this done several months back but then got bogged down in the admin side of things. I was just too burned out and could not put enough brain power into how to address the whole adapter maintenance process.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1282

Guardian wrote:

The concept is to draw together various nuke modules as a 'whole' into one page where related items can be seen together?

Yes, that is exactly how it is done.

Quote:

Nice concept but I am having difficulty grasping the 'how its done'.

You are actually right on with your thoughts on the "how" this is done. I wrote a separate app for managing the actual "forges" (or projects if you will), but then the real "meat" is in what I am calling "layouts" and "adapters".

As you can already see in my two example Forges on this site, I have two layouts in use: one for the HTML Newsletter forge and another for the NukeForge forge. I created a layout with "tags" to replace with content. Then, each content "tag" as an associated "adapter" to produce the HTML for it. This way, additional adapters can be written to basically pull related data from ANY nuke module/table.

However, you are correct, in that there has to be something to "glue" or cause the "relation". With news articles, I am "glueing" on the Topic id or Category (either one will do), for forums, I am using the Forum id, etc., etc.

The power of this concept is that, for example, I had developed the tool on a base nuke 7.5 version wih the base nuke Downloads module. When I went to deploy on Montego Scripts, I am using NSN GR Downloads module. I simply copied my Downloads adapter to a new one, changed a few SQL statements, and then used that adapter in my forge configuration rather than the base nuke one.

I can almost guarantee you -- although I have not looked at Met's tool yet -- that the MetOpen version does not do anything like this.

Now you might get a glimpse as to my dilema with the admin functions. They would have to be able to handle adapter upgrades (what happens to existing forges using the previous version adapter), new adapters, and retiring old adapters. I was just so burned out by the time I got the admin portion that I gave up. I "configured" the two sample forges using phpmyadmin!

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

I think I am understanding this better now - thanks.
Great concept, looking forward to further development whenever you find the time.

Newbie Joined: Dec 11, 2005 Posts: 28

montego, thanks for pointing this out. Very interesting. Consider this: an event forge or a fund raising campaign forge. You could tie together calendar events, donations, news, forums, etc. The adapters sound very similar to the search classes used by mSearch.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1282

[b]kguske[/], Looks like I'll have to take a look at mSearch. I purposely stayed away from classes, although I would have preferred to implement my adapters as such. The neat concept about a "Forge" is that it really could be anything you like it to be. Create a template for how the page should look -- i.e., where all the content containers should be -- and then write any adapters you need that do not already exist.

Unfortunately, I just don't have enough time to really put into it. Crying or Very sad

Maybe some day...

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

<bump>ing because I can Laughing

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1282

Wish I had the time... maybe once you're all retired and such. Wink

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

So... is this now on a sort of indefinate 'hold'?

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1282

Yes... HTML Newsletter should be my focus and it has not even been touched since earlier this year.... a MAJOR Sad

Been too busy with work, support forums and RN. Have no other time... very depressing.

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 375

Just wanted to mention, for the benefit of others, that the MetProject seems to have withered and died. It is over a year since any work was done on it and sadly, the site seems completely stagnant - a shame as I had high hopes for them.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1282

That is a definite shame. I sure liked what Heshy did with the MetOpen HomePage. Was looking forward to more. Hey, it can happen to any of us...

Newbie Joined: Jan 09, 2007 Posts: 15

Is there any further progress on this yet. I am dying to see it running.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1282

Well, you can see it running here on this site. It is what drives the content behind what is under my "Projects" links in my Site Menu to the left.

I have done nothing more to it and it is far from releasable. An entire admin module would have to be created and I just don't have that kind of time because to do it right, it would be quite complex.

I am planning on embedding, though, some of its "technologies" into the 2.0 branch of the HTML Newsletter to help make the newsletters more easily extensible. But, again, that is way out into the future...

Sorry. Just too much to do and no time to do it.