Ok, so all last night while I was "sleeping", I was in a semi-state of planning out how to begin modifying the forums.  See, I have to be very careful.  The Community Server software is fairly complex, and I don't want my modifications to become a barrier to implimenting the various version upgrades of CS.  If done the wrong way, the mod would make it difficult for us to always have the latest greatest software running. 

So at any rate, since the official CS site lacks any real information (that I've found) about writing add-ins, I've begun to think that I can simply create another project, reference the CS dlls, then I can write replacement classes that inherit from the CS code library.  That way, I only have to write code for the functions I upgrade, and can effectively ignore any functions that are good as they are.  I'm thinking that this should work well, it will mean that I have to change the .aspx pages to use my library instead of the CS library, at least any .aspx pages that I want to change.  This will mean that every time there is an upgrade, I"ll likely have to go through and rechange the files to point to my library instead of the CS library, which is something I want to minimize.  I'm going to keep a FileChanged.txt file so that I can easily and quickly do so upon each version upgrade (at least upgrades that would require changing the files).

My current priorities that I want to do using this are like so:

  • Change avatars to store their normal filetype, rather than convert everything to .jpg.  Ideally I'd convert this to store the avatars in the filesystem as well, rather than in SQL.  This will require changing the SaveProfile page (maybe the saveavatar control, not sure how they built it yet), as well as the displaypost page.
  • Change the BBcode page to have the diceroller technique as well.  The regular expression code the system uses might not be able to directly use my proposed changes, so I may have to do this after the post is all modified and whatnot.  But here's hoping!  This should only require changing the transformations file (they call the bbcode conversion stuff transformations) or maybe the addpost page, or both.

These should be good initial experiments, I'm still looking into how we can change how the site looks at long threads.  It seems to me that the site pulls the entire thread out of the db when looking at one page.  I'm really hoping thats not the case, but the fact that long threads timeout don't give me a lot of hope here. This may be a drastic change coming, I'm really hoping this is fixed in 1.1 or 1.2, version changes that should be coming soon.