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?

[Michael Morris]

Running into problems with the permissions system.

I don't want the standard thread editting scripts to be able to handle the forum containing the reviews, just the custom script. How can I turn the forum off to the general scripts and retain an ability to moderate who modifies the data with the custom scripts...

Note that I'm testing this with a spells database project first (because it should be simpler). Spell data needs 10 fields of data appended to the first post only. Subsequest posts can be handled with newreply since they have no additional data (basically they are discussions concerning the spell itself).

I've created a new table with fields for the information and a new forum to hold the threads (each spell has a thread, so the new table cross-indexes on the threadid colum and can be appended using LEFTJOIN ON threadid). I've saved newthread.php as newspell.php

And here's where I'm starting to have problems. I want the script to automatically define the forum as #7 - I don't want that script to look at or modify threads in any other forum. However, each time I try to define $foruminfo or $_REQUEST['f'] I get a "Sorry, this forum isn't open for posts" error even though I know it is (I haven't changed the settings for that forum from the default.

And so, I'm getting stuck. Help would be appreciated plz.