BeerRiot Forums

Yes, the update I promised earlier in the week is now live. BeerRiot's Forums are now open for discussion.

I know what some of you are thinking. "Forums?! Every site under the sun has forums. What did you waste weeks on forums for?" Clearly, if there was an ounce of sense in my head, I would have grabbed the nearest PhpBB implementation, tossed it up, and been done with it.

Well, I agree.

Except that I just couldn't bear having such a disconnected, tacked on hunk of lameness. Even assuming that people wouldn't mind the pain in the neck of having a second logon for a forum system, what I really wanted was a system that could really relate to the rest of the content on the site.

For example, I expect people to want to talk about a group (or several) of beers. Maybe someone will have a question about how two styles relate (porter and stout, hefeweizen and wheat, ...), or they will have just returned from an event with an interesting selection. I think they should be able to easily set up a discussion about exactly the set of beers they want. So, since we were already doing this to some extent with tags, I have made it a key feature of discussion topics that they should be able to have tags associated with them.

I also expect people to want to get the word out about upcoming beer events. They'll want to tell people where, and when, but then also discuss how it went afterward. So, in the events forum, all topics are allowed to have dates and locations associated with them.

As such, I went on my merry way developing. An opportunity to sling more Erlang code - how could I resist? ;)

As if that weren't bad enough, there was the realization late in the project that the new forum system was so much better than the beer comment system that there was no way I could leave the elder in place. So, out came the old, and in went the new. And hey - I always wanted to let people comment directly on breweries, why not add that in too?

If you've been anywhere near the software industry (or, in fact, I suspect any industry), you recognize now the project spiral. "Just one more thing, then it will be ready." That's how it went for the first couple of weeks. Luckily I recognized the spiral at that point too, and cut off some of the broader plans to get this pushed out (don't worry - they're still on the agenda, just on a different deadline).

Believe it or not, I believe I was lucky enough to be able to pick joints at which to truncate plans, that after this big, bulky update I should be able to roll out some nice, smaller updates fairly quickly and smoothly. The next news item shouldn't be three weeks away. ;)

So that's that. In case you're wondering, no, I still don't regret choosing Erlang/ErlyWeb for this project. I didn't run up against anything in this development that this system was incapable of handling. As mentioned above, I likely would have been delving deep into the guts of any forum system I chose, so development time would have been just as long. Getting to do it in a language that doesn't annoy me [yet] was a real treat.

Categories: Development