02 Dec 08 Anatomy of a Shoutbox; Part 1- Requirements

One of the applications from the current SG101 website I want to bring over is the shoutbox. Shoutboxes are very popular in the Nuke community, and I was very surprised at how much my users took to it. It may very well be the 2nd most popular application after the forums. It is kind of a community Twitter for the site (hmmm did the Twitter guys get the idea for Twitter from the lowly shout box?).

The current site is using a shoutbox script developed by the now defunct ourscripts.net site. The script was obviously a labor of love by the original developer, but to my taste it is over-engineered and somewhat heavy handed in terms of resources it uses. It is highly configurable; it has admin options for changing the style (theme), user banning, IP banning, a bad word filter, configurable emoticons, etc. After running this script for over two years now I think I really only need the following features.

1. Only registered users can shout.
2. Shouts should scroll (users love this for some reason).
3. Any URLs in the shout should be made clickable (and preferably shortened or truncated).
4. Emoticons (smilies) are absolutely required.
5. Shout history should be displayable.
6. Users should be able to edit or delete their shouts in the history.
7. XHTML compliant (the current script is not).
8. The admin should be able to edit and delete shouts.

And that’s basically it. I may decide to have the thing auto-prune shouts, as Django doesn’t currently have a bulk delete feature in the auto-generated admin interface (but that is coming in Django 1.1).

I’m going to be using emoticons in other comment and forum applications all over the site, so thinking ahead here, it is probably best to create that functionality in a separate Django application that the shoutbox will use.

Okay, in keeping with my limited time and my new attempt to blog more but in more manageable pieces, I’ll stop here. The next few posts will detail the stages of development of this application.

Tags: django, sg101, shoutbox