Author

Michael JasonSmith

Contact

Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@onlinegroups.net>

Date

2015-02-23

Organization

GroupServer.org

Copyright

This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License by OnlineGroups.net.

A topic is the core of the system that displays posts in GroupServer. It is, at its most basic, a group of posts with a common subject. This product supplies the code for handling the traversal to the topic, the page for rendering the topic, and some supporting JavaScript.

The messages/topic traversal system is used to determine if a participant should see the topic page, a 410 Gone error page (if the topic has been hidden), or a 404 Not Found if the topic does not exist.

The Topic Page is the workhorse of GroupServer, as it displays the core content of a GroupServer group. It is divided into four main sections: a summary a sticky toggle, the list of posts itself, and the Post a reply form. Most sections provide viewlets for the gs.group.messages.topic.base.interfaces.ITopicPage viewlet manager.

The Topic Page starts with a summary of the topic: how many posts, who made the most recent post, and the keywords. This summary is designed to reflect the metadata shown in the Topics list on the Group page.

The sticky-topic toggle appears as part of the toolbar at the top of the Topic Page, next to the navigation links and the Share button, if the person that is viewing the page is an administrator. The toggle is a small form, provided by the gs-group-messages-topic-admin-stickytoggle viewlet. When the page is loaded it checks with page gs-group-messages-topic-sticky-getter to determine if the topic is sticky or not, and adjusts the Sticky button accordingly. When the administrator toggles the Sticky button the page gs-group-messages-topic-sticky-setter is used to change the topic.

The list of posts, provided by the gs-group-messages-topic-list viewlet, forms the bulk of the Topic Page. However, the list is simple, as most of the actual rendering of each post in the topic is done by the gs.group.messages.post product¹.

The Topic Page finishes with the Post a reply form. It is shown to everyone that can post². It is a non-stand form:

• The From field uses the user's name and profile photo in place of a label.
• The Message field is unlabelled.
• The multi-file widget³ enables an arbitrary number of widgets to be submitted with the form.

The lack of labels makes the Post a reply form more similar to a standard email client.

Three JavaScript resources are provided by this product.

/++resource++gs-group-messages-topic-multifile-20160127.js:

Customisation to the MultiFile system⁴.

/++resource++stickytoggle-20151112.js:

Client-side code to power the Sticky toggle.

• Code repository: https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.messages.topic.base
• Translations: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/gs-group-messages-topic-base/
• Questions and comments to http://groupserver.org/groups/development
• Report bugs at https://redmine.iopen.net/projects/groupserver