Commentary request on setting up a reviews forum

[Michael Morris]

Hello all. My next project for EN World is to combine it's reviews database - which is driven by a homemade program I didn't write (and contains almost no commentary code ARRRGGH!!) and vbulletin. I intend to simply read it's data into the forums using a one time install script. I'm trying to plot the best way to do this, and am asking for advice.

My plan is to do this in two stages. Stage 1, write a reviews interface for vbulletin that duplicates all the major features of the old system. Test it for stability and let the users play with it awhile. Stage 2, worry about the conversion script.

I figure reviews are very similar to the forums and threads model that I can employ this at the core of the reviews. Also, by using existing vbulletin mechanics I save time and headaches. I'm thinking of creating a reviews forum. In this forum each thread will represent one product. The first post in the thread will be a synopsis of the product, and then each reply will either be a new review or a comment on an existing review. The reviews and comments will be sorted using vbulletin's existing threaded view. The whole thing will be set up so that if you point the forum viewer program at a review thread and use the threaded view you'll see each review and then replies to that review all neatly lined up.

Now, reviews have extra fields - Author(s), Library of Congress #, Suggested Retail, Format, Publisher, etc. I'm thinking the best approach to this is to create a new table called reviews within the database. Each extra tidbit will be it's own field and this table will contain a copy of the threadid table referencing the thread that contains the reviews themselves. Hence I can use a MySQL LEFTJOIN call to append this table to the thread table (LEFTJOIN review ON threadid). Since the lion's share of the review text exists with in the context of forums/threads the search engine should be able to find things without undue searching (also a seperate search engine will probably be needed to find items on the review table itself - for instance search for all products by publisher X or written by author Y).

A custom pair of programs will then be written for proper viewing and storing of reviews - further these will probably be written to run under VbAdvanced CMPS (or at least the viewer will).

Anyway, does anyone have and questions or comments on possible pitfalls I might not be aware of in using this approach?