It works but it’s not the most pretty thing in the world. @franzliedke
Would be great if you could take a look at the whole formatting API and
work your magic on it sometime… my brain is fried!
Originally the user activity feed was implemented using UNIONs. I was
looking at make an API to add activity “sources”, or extra UNION
queries (select from posts, mentions, etc.) but quickly realised that
this is too slow and there’s no way to make it scale.
So I’ve implemented an API which is very similar to how notifications
work (see previous commit). The `activity` table is an aggregation of
stuff that happens, and it’s kept in sync by an ActivitySyncer which is
used whenever a post it created/edited/deleted, a user is
mentioned/unmentioned, etc.
Again, the API is very simple (see Core\Activity\PostedActivity +
Core\Handlers\Events\UserActivitySyncer)
It turns out that the idea of “sending” a notification is flawed. (What
happens if the notification subject is deleted shortly after? The
notified user would end up with a dud notification which would be
confusing. What about if a post is edited to mention an extra user? If
you sent out notifications, the users who’ve already been mentioned
would get a duplicate notification.)
Instead, I’ve introduced the idea of notification “syncing”. Whenever a
change is made to a piece of data (e.g. a post is created, edited, or
deleted), you make a common notification and “sync” it to a set of
users. The users who’ve received this notification before won’t get it
again. It will be sent out to new users, and hidden from users who’ve
received it before but are no longer recipients (e.g. users who’ve been
“unmentioned” in a post).
To keep track of this, we use the existing notifications database
table, with an added `is_deleted` column. The syncing/diffing is
handled all behind the scenes; the API is extremely simple (see
Core\Notifications\DiscussionRenamedNotification +
Core\Events\Handlers\DiscussionRenamedNotifier)
For now I’ve chucked it on Flarum\Core as a static method, but
ultimately I think we will need a ConfigRepository abstraction (whether
it replaces or sits underneath the Flarum\Core static method I’m not
sure).
Also starting to think about multisite scenarios, I think this is
important. The Forum model could actually end up with a database table
behind it, and each forum would have its own config settings? Haven’t
really thought about it too hard yet…
- The recipient(s) are the concern of the notifier/sender, not the
notification itself
- Allow “retraction” of notifications (e.g. if a discussion is
stickied, but then it is unstickied)
- Misc. cleanup
Perhaps also in user activity stream. They are used in the mentions
extension.
In order to generate the excerpt, each formatter can implement a
“strip” method which basically converts block formatting into inline
formatting.
For example: when you rename a discussion, DiscussionRenamedPost is
created. If you rename it again immediately afterwards, then a new
DiscussionRenamedPost can be merged into the old one. This will either
result in the old one being updated with the new title, or it being
deleted all together if it was renamed back to the old title.
This is useful for both the Sticky and Categories extensions, where if
you sticky a discussion and then immediately unsticky it, or if you
move it to a category and then immediately move it back, the last
“activity” post will be removed.
- Extract shared Ember components into a “flarum-common” ember-cli
addon. This can be used by both the forum + admin Ember apps, keeping
things DRY
- Move LESS styles into their own top-level directory and do a similar
thing (extract common styles)
- Add LESS/JS compilation and versioning to PHP (AssetManager)
- Set up admin entry point
(Theoretical) upgrade instructions:
- Delete everything in [app_root]/public
- Set up tooling in forum/admin Ember apps (npm install/update, bower
install/update) and then build them (ember build)
- php artisan vendor:publish
- Upgrade flarum/flarum repo (slight change in a config file)
- If you need to trigger a LESS/JS recompile, delete the .css/.js files
in [app_root]/public/flarum. I set up LiveReload to do this for me when
I change files in less/ or ember/
Todo:
- Start writing admin app!
- Remove bootstrap/font-awesome from repo and instead depend on their
composer packages? Maybe? (Bower is not an option here)
- Notifications can be delivered in multiple ways (alert, email)
- Different notification types can implement interfaces to allow
themselves to be delivered in these various ways
- User preferences for each notification type/method combination are
automatically registered
This is so that if an extension adds a post type, and the database gets
populated with posts of that type, but then if the extension is
disabled, we wouldn’t want those posts to display because we would have
no knowledge about how to deal with/render them.
