DPWR Progress (Again)
This is harder than I remember it being… of course, last time I literally just hacked a few queries together and didn’t do much at all in the way of actual database integration. This time around I’m going all out with new post markers and view counts and everything. Thus, it’s slower-going than I expected it to be.
That said, the Library is coming along nicely. The main index page is working, and the story list just needs a modification to only show the number of comments a story has received, excluding the number of story posts made (might include that separately). The trouble with that is that the information isn’t stored in the topic cache this way, so I’d need to query the database an unknown number of times to get all of the post IDs and their parents for each story, then loop through them for each topic and get final counts for story posts and comments. This may end up being more trouble than it’s worth, and I may as a result end up pulling the count altogether. Hopefully I can work something out, though.
The story page itself is also making headway. Creating a nested comment structure is hard, even when you’re only nesting one level deep. However, I finally banged out a rather insanely elegant solution that takes full advantage of the <foreach> construct in IPB’s HTML-logic parser. I’m rather proud of it, I must say. Now I just have to make sure the posts are parsing correctly, tidy up the actual presentation, and integrate the code to mark the story as read when viewing it, and I’ll be pretty much all set on the viewing front.
I plan on getting the view component of the Library wrapped up tomorrow, and getting the view component of the News wrapped up on Saturday. Posting, commenting, replying, editing, and moderating will have to wait until late Saturday and Sunday. That pushes getting the Golden KI automation done back into next week, hopefully no later than Tuesday. If I still have time before next Friday, I’d like to see how feasible it would be to get a search built in to the Library and News segments; we’ll have to see, though… it may not end up happening, just because search is a pain, and managing permissions within the forum the way I’ve got it hacked is a whole ‘nother can of worms. 
Anyway, I’ll probably be doing a backup of the live database next Friday or Saturday, uploading it to the test server, and executing an update on it there to see where any kinks might crop up and fix them before deploying this thing live. We’re getting close!