Plan for Brandon Maness
by Brandon Maness · 07/16/2005 (8:49 pm) · 0 comments
In case you're just tuning in, I've been slowly assembling all the necessary components that are required for a useful tutorial system. It started with a flash video player that could stream in multiple .swf clips and present them as one seamless video clip to the end user. Next up was a voting system for community feedback and directional input. And now a hybrid forum system that "plugs" in to the video player. The idea was to create a context based forum that is located inside the video tutorial segment that is currently being viewed.
The problem I've found with lengthy complex topics is context. For example, if you're working on step5 of 10 in a series and have a question about a 6 minute video of step 5, wouldn't it be nice to click a forum button within the video player and open up a forum focused on that very step. The forum system would contain all the "Topics" or steps related to the current tutorial as a whole, but when you first click the forum button, within any of the steps, it brings you to the topic that relates to the video you are currently watching. I thought it would be helpful, so it's done!
The forum had to integrate into a shared hosting environment that would not consume vast resources, so I couldn't have it dynamically creating pages from a forum database every time a user clicked a new page. The solution was an XML embodied topic based "mini" forum that serves a "data" only static XML file to the flash video player that is showing the current video tutorial. The video player creates all the "pages" and organizes the content, user input, validation, etc. This leaves the shared server to just handle new thread posts, and message editing/deleting. Everything else is handled inside the flash player on the client side, thus dozens of user clicks navigating through the forum will not affect the server. Tada!
It's not perfect, and is still early beta, but it's working good so far. I went ahead and threw in just about every useful standard posting feature I could think of: Bold, italic, underline, quote, code block, image, url, url with custom text for link button, url with image for custom link button, and email notification of threads you have selected to watch!. All within flash.. Let me tell you, that was no easy feat! Had I spent any time, or known before hand what a mess actionscript2.0 was I might have upgraded servers instead, but once I start something, it's hard to quit a loser, so it is finished, and actionscript2 did get the job done.
If anyone has a similar need for a mostly client based flash/xml/asp.net forum solution I would consider cleaning up the code and releasing it. Below is a screen shot of the top most "Topic" navigation page, followed by the create new thread window, and a shot of the forum plug-in inside the video player of course.
If you want to see it in action, follow this link torque.smdlabs.com
B--
The problem I've found with lengthy complex topics is context. For example, if you're working on step5 of 10 in a series and have a question about a 6 minute video of step 5, wouldn't it be nice to click a forum button within the video player and open up a forum focused on that very step. The forum system would contain all the "Topics" or steps related to the current tutorial as a whole, but when you first click the forum button, within any of the steps, it brings you to the topic that relates to the video you are currently watching. I thought it would be helpful, so it's done!
The forum had to integrate into a shared hosting environment that would not consume vast resources, so I couldn't have it dynamically creating pages from a forum database every time a user clicked a new page. The solution was an XML embodied topic based "mini" forum that serves a "data" only static XML file to the flash video player that is showing the current video tutorial. The video player creates all the "pages" and organizes the content, user input, validation, etc. This leaves the shared server to just handle new thread posts, and message editing/deleting. Everything else is handled inside the flash player on the client side, thus dozens of user clicks navigating through the forum will not affect the server. Tada!
It's not perfect, and is still early beta, but it's working good so far. I went ahead and threw in just about every useful standard posting feature I could think of: Bold, italic, underline, quote, code block, image, url, url with custom text for link button, url with image for custom link button, and email notification of threads you have selected to watch!. All within flash.. Let me tell you, that was no easy feat! Had I spent any time, or known before hand what a mess actionscript2.0 was I might have upgraded servers instead, but once I start something, it's hard to quit a loser, so it is finished, and actionscript2 did get the job done.
If anyone has a similar need for a mostly client based flash/xml/asp.net forum solution I would consider cleaning up the code and releasing it. Below is a screen shot of the top most "Topic" navigation page, followed by the create new thread window, and a shot of the forum plug-in inside the video player of course.
If you want to see it in action, follow this link torque.smdlabs.com
B--
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