On an unrelated note:

Magnus, I've been trying to figure out how to make a message board similar to this for my own site. Two questions:

1. Would I be correct in guessing that the database is structured in some sort of nested hierarchy, where each message is contained as a data object containing its topic, text, writer, and sub-messages? (I thought of this whilst in Choir today... I am such a geek.)

2. Any chance of me getting a copy of your code? :-)

I like the way message postings are done here too. Everything is layed out pretty nice.

I like ticalc's nested-hierarchy method, too. Most message boards on other websites simply list one post after the other, and the order seems completely random. It makes it really confusing and difficult to follow a thread! On ticalc.org it's very logical. It's a great idea.

That's what I was trying to say...I just didn't know how to say it. :)

Word to nested- heirarchy

*spills a Mountain Dew* here's one for my homies

I prefer Rum...

But... but... Mountain Dew is a staple of survival for geeks like us!

Mountain Dew -> Caffene. Caffene (excuse the spelling) -> Hyper. Hyper -> me.

1) Basic structure of the database (note, of course there are a lot more fields, but this is the simple stuff) in SQL CREATE statements:

CREATE TABLE articles(articleid int SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, subject varchar(128), body text, rootid int REFERENCES articles(articleid), iscomment int DEFAULT 1)

CREATE TABLE article_bind(parent int REFERENCES articles(articleid), child int REFERENCES articles(articleid))


The rootid and iscomment fields in the articles table are just shortcut fields to make queries faster (rootid == article id if the master article of the thread that the article in question is a part of - that way you can cut down to 1 query to generate a complete page). Their information can be derived from the other information, so it's definitly a step away from normalisation - but anything for speed, right? :-)


That's the base. We have some things like broken-out text bodies into a different table to make the article table smaller (and thus faster to search) etc, just for optimisation.

Each comment is an article which has iscomment set to trie, and it also has a corresponding row in article_bind which binds it to its parent id.


2) Not really, at least not now :) You probably couldn't do *all* that much with it anyway, since it's littered with calls into our internal libraries for session management. If you have any further questions on the topic, feel free to mail me, though.

Woot.

I need to learn SQL, I guess... Right now, all I know (that would help here) is Perl and Python. Javascript and HTML just don't do it. Perl *can* be object-oriented, but it gets confusing after a whiel. Python *is* object-oriented, but it's too basic for my purposes.

Any good links to sites that could help me learn how? (especially SQL tutorials, etc.)