Discussion Board
Author: Brett Goodwin
Introduction
The CAST Discussion Board is a very simple message board system for use within Cascade Server. The posts are maintained within Cascade as separate "page" type assets, which are created and published using PHP and Web Service SOAP calls whenever someone makes a new post. They are maintained in a thread-style format.
The system consists of a "main" page which lists all available topics. Each topic has a home page, which lists the threads that it contains. Each thread can then be viewed, and one post at a time can be viewed from the automatically generated thread history tree.
Usage
All of the files needed to get the system up-and-running are included in this package. The included files are very basic, but the nice thing about maintaining this system within Cascade is that you can update the look and feel and decide which information you want to display without making changes to the functional back-end. As long as you maintain the same data definitions, and the basic structure of all of the forms which submit to discussion.php, you can modify the configuration set, template, etc as you see fit.
In order to run the message board, first make sure you are running a web server with PHP installed. Create a target for the message board and make sure it is publishing files with the extension ".php". Upload the discussion-template and associate it with the target.
Upload all three data definition files. Create a new home directory for the board, and upload discussion.php and wsdl.php. Upload discussion-config.xml or set up the data definition in this directory. Create stylesheets using all of the included xsl files. Make sure you already have, or make, index blocks for the current directory, and the current page. Create a configuration set for the "main" page, "topic" pages, and "post"s. Create a page called 'index' in this directory, and associate it with the correct configuration set. Publish everything, load up the index page, and start creating topics and posts!
Example Files
- discussion-board.zip
This zip file contains all the necessary scripts and XML/XSL to run the discussion board. - discussion-php.txt
This is the file which handles requests to create new posts or message board topics. It interacts with Cascade Server using SOAP web service calls to create and publish the necessary assets. - discussion-config.xml
This file tells discussion.php how to interact with Cascade Server. It can be uploaded and modified manually, or you can use the included discussion-config-data-definition to change variable values within Cascade. - discussion-config-data-definition.xml
If you want a graphical interface for editing discussion-config.xml, use this source to create a data definition. Attach this data definition to a page that will publish the exact XML content, and name it discussion-config. - discussion-data-definition.xml
This is a data definition for message board posts. - discussion-main-data-definition.xml
This is a data definition for the home page of the message board. It is only used to modify the name of the message board. - discussion-template.xhtml
This is the template used for every page in the included message board system. - discussion-topic-data-definition.xml
This data definition defines a data definition for topics within the message board including the topic name and description. - xml-template.xhtml
This is an extremely basic XML template which can be used with the discussion config data definition. - wsdl-php.txt
This is the PHP API wrapper around the Cascade Server WSDL.