Sneak Preview: Forms/Profiles for Forums

Although I'm not quite ready for a release, I thought I'd announce this hack and get some feedback while I'm still in the development stages.

What does it do? Well, take a look first: http://www.noows.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1042

It allows you to associate a predefined fill-in-the-blanks form with a forum. Every thread can have form data associated with it, much like every thread can have a poll. Actually, with this hack, every thread can have both!

In my case, I run a small guild/gaming site where players of EverQuest want to display their in-game character information. Many players have multiple characters, etc, which really doesn't make extending the membership profiles easy or practical.

How does it work? ... Create a new thread/post as usual, associate a poll if the user wants. Once submitted, the thread starter or forum moderators, will have access to an 'edit form' button (same style/position as the existing 'new thread'/'post reply' buttons in the header/footer of every thread).

By clicking on the 'edit form' button, the user is presented with a fill in-the-blanks form.

formprefix field gets added to the forum table.

A new table, called {formprefix} gets added to your vBulletin database. (in my case, 'eqchar')

formid field gets added to the thread table.

When the user wants to edit a form, form.php processes form_edit_{eqchar}. For those viewing the thread, showthread.php processes form_show_{eqchar}.

Most of the work with this hack will be customizing the form_edit_ and form_show_ templates, as well as your table. Of course, once released I'd hope others would develop and share templates/table structures to truely make this a plug & play hack.

Your custom table must contain an integer field named 'id'.
After that, fields are labled as followed: text_{yourname}, num_{yourname}, and sel_{yourname}. Text type is self-explanatory. Num type ensures the user entered numeric data, or sets value to 0. Sel type is for drop down box selections. It's just a text field, but some extra processing is done to set the selector ("selected") to the current db value if the form is edited.

These same db field names are used as $formvars[text_{yourname}] within your templates to display the database values.

I'll probably add options for radio buttons and checkboxes. I seriously doubt I'll support binaries, as posts support this just fine.

Sorry for the default theme look, will change eventually. I just migrated from PHP-Nuke - what can PHPNuke do that vBulletin doesn't do better? I'm already looking into writing a SIMPLE home page/weblog for vBulletin. I want one-two files that I can drop in on top of vBulletin and go.

looks very cool.

That will be very usefull for a game page.

Nice!

[ToraTora!]

i think there is other practical uses for this hack as well.
The one thing i grow tired of, is the lack of tabling in the VB threads as far as post responses go. So, if I wanted to add a area for baseball stats, I would basically have to do it in HTML, and link it to the site, in order for it to appear as a valid "chart", and not a jumbled up mess that appears when you try and do it within the forums itself. Top it off with the fact you have to have HTML on in order to clear up these situations if you wish to have it directly in your site, and not a link, its basically a mess waiting to happen.

Although my opinion on your development may not matter, I would like to be the first to encourage you in the finalization of this hack.
I see roughly 5 or 6 uses for this, that could pertain to many, many areas of use for those in the news, stats, games, etc department...its a excellent idea, and when you have fished this hack, I will be waiting in line for it.

Totally Agree ToraTara,

I don't know if this would be possible as I don't know how your coding it, but here is something that I think would be good.

Say you have a 'sports team site' something like this would be really useful for stats on each player, team stats etc etc. Say you or a moderator started the thread, but didn't know a few stats so you would leave these blank. Registered users could, 'fill in the blanks', but before they where submitted to the 'final form' they would have to be verified by the moderator (which you can do through permissions anyway).

Hope you understand the idea - I look forward to seeing it in action.

[ToraTora!]

That is exactly what was running at our set-up. It was just as a little extra feature, a little update if you will...nothing along the lines of ESPN or anything of that magnitude, but it has turned into a major headache for the guy who is maintainning it for us, and as such, its been sort of dumped on our lap now...lol..
The user that started the project, is basically giving up on it, due to the complete non-freindly tabling, and information interface.
With baseball, just for example, you are constantly changing stats, scores, rain delays...etc...I am glad that at this point, the NBA is done for awhile...lol...

The problem is, that the person taking care of this task, is also HTML illiterate. He had started putting them into the forums, and unfortuantely, as we all know, they wont table up, and he didnt know that. He had sunk in close to three hours lining everything up, and than when he hit submit, and than looked at what he had created, he was a little bit pissed to say the least.

So, i think that this would be a great addition, to a major problem of keeping the viewers of the forums, AT the forums, and not jumping around to other sites looking for info that we could provide at the same level of accuaracy, and than us as administrators can handle the other things, rather than having to go back and enter in all the information, for another members project..lol..

so, yes, the sooner the better...

Just out of interest, I would be interested to know how you do it - just a simplified explanation.

Cheers

PS - The 'search' feature didn't go unnoticed either - very slick!

[sysmom]

I'm VERY interested in this feature, and would like to add it to a game-based board, too.

I can't get to the example of it, server out to lunch message in my browser, but I will look at it tomorrow.

Are you looking for feedback about it specifically, or just a general "Yes I'm interested" type of response here?

-deb

Originally posted by chilliboy

PS - The 'search' feature didn't go unnoticed either - very slick!

The search feature probably wouldn't be part of the hack. I could probably release it, but it'd require 100% customization (it's custom to my table of data). It's not auto-generated like the forms themselves... hmm.

Anyways, got distracted from this hack for a few days, working on a drop-in image gallery, while my guinea-pigs ... er, users ... play with the forms hack and find bugs.

Biggest thing I'm not happy with is the process of filling in a form. You go through the normal new thread/post/poll creation process. Then, when you VIEW the post, you have this button:
appear with the new thread, post reply buttons at the top/bottom of each thread. Initially, I was gonna code it into the new thread creation process: New Thread->Redirect New Poll (if needed)->Redirect New Form, but I REALLY HATE making code changes to the stock PHP files. As is, there's only 2 minor source code changes: showthread.php and admin/forum.php. Everything else is in a new PHP file, new templates, or template edits.

Unless any of my users find a bug tomorrow, I'll put out release on Wednesday and go from there.