Sphene Community Tools

Dell has a great site called Idea Storm ( http://www.ideastorm.com ) that shares a lot of similarities with a forum board, but it is not one. Do you think is it feasible to use the board application as a base for it or a new application is better?
I don't need a board but I really think Idea Storm fits our needs and I want to make it Sphene Compatible, and not a single project. I'm afraid that it can mean architecture changes to board application, if sharing classes.
(btw: herbert suggested the board application as a base for a blog, it isn't the case to analyse the board architecture for improvements?)

--- Last Edited by Anderson Santos at 2007-08-13 19:37:47 ---

I think it is always a good idea - at least to think about using a board as a base for something which has user submissions/discussions as it's core idea.. - and IdeaStorm seems to be of this kind ..

the more such ideas (IdeaStorm, personal weblog, support forum/CRM) we discuss the higher the chances we find the core all of these applications can share.. but i think the current architecture isn't that bad at all although some extensibility would definitively be needed.
I could imagine a customization layer where you the 'Category' model gets a new attribute 'type' (or whatsoever) .. this 'type' is like the 'renderers' for the Posts .. (ie fully extendable by 3rd party applications)
so you would have one type 'board', one type 'ideastorm', one type 'blog', one type 'support' .. each having different templates, maybe additional models which are referenced, etc. but share the Post model including all it's features (authorization, rendering, etc.)


i just have taken a brief look at ideastorm .. but the base data objects simply include some kind of point system where user can promote or devote "Threads" (or .. ideas..) - so it doesn't look too sophisticated to me :)

Exactly, it's not sophisticated at all, it just a "forum" base with some improvements to threads.
I was just afraid about need some architecture changes that won't be implemented in sphene core.
Ha, it's starting to sound a good place to be =P