A simple, extensible, threaded bulletin board system for Evennia, with both on-game and web-based interfaces. The on-game interface is modeled loosely after Firan's fork of Myrddin's BBoard system, or after Arx's bboard system. The web interface is modeled loosely after phpBB type web-forums.
Paxboards was originally written by Packetdancer, a.k.a. "Pax", for use on Aurora Chain.
Simply grab this repository as a subdirectory of your Evennia game directory, and then add the following line to your server/conf/settings.py file:
INSTALLED_APPS += ('paxboards',)
You will then next need to go to commands/default_cmdsets.py and add:
from paxboards.commands import add_board_commands
And then edit CharacterCmdSet's at_cmdset_creation function to add add_board_commands(self) to the bottom.
Next, go to web/urls.py and add:
custom_patterns = [
url(r'^boards/', include('paxboards.urls', namespace='board', app_name='paxboards')),
]
If you already have custom patterns, just add the url record to your existing list.
Lastly, you will need to copy paxboards.css from the templates directory of the paxboards installation to your web/static/website/css directory.
When all of this is done, run evennia makemigrations paxboards and evennia migrate, then execute @reload on your game, and you should be good to go.
You can use the bbadmin command on your game to create a test board.
If you want to link the boards from anywhere on your website, simply use {% url 'paxboards:boardlist' %} in any template file to automatically generate the appropriate URL for your site installation.
DefaultBoard is a new Evennia base class, which encapsulates all the board functionality.
It also exposes a custom Django manager/queryset handler, allowing you to easily query which bboards are visible to a specific player from the class itself.
It supports full lock handlers, with the following access keys:
read: can read the board -- this is necessary to see the board in your listpost: can post to the boardedit: can edit posts by people other than yourselfdelete: can delete posts by people other than yourselfpin: can pin or unpin posts from the board
Post is a simple object class which encapsulates a given post. Boards can be asked for their posts, and when you provide a calling player, it will annotate each Post with an 'unread' property as to whether or not that property has been read.
It supports some simple tools to check whether or not a player has access to perform a given operation.
- As this was my first major Evennia code and I was just off in my own corner with it, there's probably places I could've done things more 'properly' by an Evennia standard (instead of a Django standard with Evennia-ish bits thrown in):
- For instance, DefaultBoard doesn't really need to be set up as a typeclass, or if it is, it should use normal dbrefs.
- If they used normal dbrefs, then tags/attributes could be used instead of the
db_*fields that are presently used to configure boards. - The entire thing probably didn't need to be made a Django installable application; it may not fit well into normal Evennia contrib as a result.
- The DefaultBoard/Post APIs could be cleaned up considerably; we probably shouldn't be dipping into the models'
db_*fields for basic access outside of the classes themselves. I started a bit of this.
- We could stand to move away from doing makemigrations, and store the migrations in git instead.
- The web-side could be cleaned up
- The CSS/HTML styling for the actual threads could definitely be better.
- The web-side needs proper web-forum-style paging, so you can get smaller 'chunks' of a board at once.
- Optionally, boards should legitimately truncate their data rather than just obscuring it but keeping the historical data. This would be relevant for boards like Classifieds on Arx.
- Optionally, it should be possible to set a particularly spammy board (again, akin to Classifieds on Arx) as not shared on the web.
- The helpfile for bboard could be a lot better in general.