The JungleDragon comment system »
FERDY CHRISTANT - APR 2, 2009 (09:07:35 PM)
In my leisure time, I am fairly obsessed with my project JungleDragon, I often cannot wait to start working on it. Although most of my recent articles are inspired by things I did, learned or researched for JungleDragon, I realize I have kept you mostly in the dark about what I'm building, how I'm doing it and what my progress is.
Therefore today a small update on one particular item: the comment system. In JungleDragon, users can comment on images, and later on also on articles. The comment system will be fairly advanced, in that it offers comment nesting, voting, inline replies, sort options, collapsing/expanding replies, and much more.
Building such a comment system is not a world-class innovation. It is no easy task either I must tell you. Last week I achieved the first major milestone: designing the data model in such a way that it allows for unlimited comment nesting, whilst still being easy and fast to query. The result is the article Hierarchical data in MySQL, in which I explain how I tackled that challenge. The next milestone I accomplished today: developing the UI/rendering logic that will output the proper markup, along with some very basic styling. Below is a screenshot of the comments section of an image:
This screenshot shows that the comments are displayed in the correct order. They are also displayed in the correct nesting and the number of replies per nesting are correct. The alghoritm to do this is not complex, but I did struggle a bit since I had to create it from scratch. Producing the CSS was not easy either, as is often the case with nested float elements.
Surely you notice the unstyled look, this is just some raw markup with exaggerated CSS styles to test the nesting for various data sets. There is tons of work ahead of me to style it properly and implementing all kinds of AJAX interactions, but I consider that to be the easy part.
Quick check...do you find little JungleDragon progress updates like this interesting?
Comments: 2
COMMENT: MARKUS HENKE
APR 3, 2009 - 06:47:26
In some aspects it's similar to JungleDragon. We have some sort of a (small) community and users should be able to comment on nearly everthing (news, articles, clan wars etc.). But it's not as complex as JungleDragon seems to be. Therefore I'm very interested in your posts about JungleDragon.
How do you motivate yourself? For me it's sometimes quite hard to motivate myself and to focus on the important things. It's not like at work where I have fixed deadlines and I have to finish the project. Instead of focusing on the code I sometimes catch myself spending to much time on the design of the page instead of focusing on the code to be finished. Do you have similar problems?
Would it be possible to have a look at a live version of JungleDragon?
So to answer your question: I'm interested in JungleDragon progress updates.
Markus «
COMMENT: FERDY
APR 3, 2009 - 07:38:22 AM
"How do you motivate yourself? For me it's sometimes quite hard to motivate myself and to focus on the important things"
That's a very good question. In fact, I will try to answer this question in a seperate blog post soon.
"Would it be possible to have a look at a live version of JungleDragon?"
I'm sorry, but it's way too early for that
I will try to share more though. «