Hmm. So, using ListPages to display comments, and killing the Comments module? I'd not really thought of doing that but it sounds interesting. The danger is that it will just be too difficult for people to use. I really like being able to chuck a comments module into a template.

OK, presumably not killing the Comments module, but at least not using it for the forum…

We need to test the idea and see what's missing today.

I was thinking about something like this being supported:

[[module ListPages category="forum" parent="announcements:_start" tags="%%page_unix_name%%" order="dateCreatedDesc"]]
%%title%% %%author%%
%%content%%
[[/module]]

• Somehow, adding an underscore in front of those tags so they don't appear in a tagcloud module.
• Or, alternatively, comments could be linked to a "thread" by parenthood, not tags.

Doing it this way would meant that each comment is a page, we can set permissions so that only the comment/page author can edit. We can allow file uploads. We can even allow rating of each comment/page.

Or… using the same parent technique as for posts. No tags for this, keep them for state (_closed, etc.).

Which starts to turn a forum into a kind of living, stateful tree of discussion where the top level is "thread" but in fact it's pages all the way down. Freaky.

The UI will be hard: i.e. how to show children of children. Or do we restrict to two levels (thread/post) and leave it at that for now? Simpler is better here, I think.

I mean, attach comment pages to the parent post page, not the section:_start.

Yes, as I said, parenthood is another alternative. Half-way through writing my post it occurred to me that using parents was the better option.

Very freaky ;)

Why would we need to show children of children?

Forum
— Section
— — Thread
— — — Post

Hmm… you mean showing a count of the number of comments for each thread, on the section page?

I suppose CountPages would need to be able to be used within other modules:

[[module ListPages parent="announcements:_start" ......]]
[ table ] [ row ]
[ cell ] thread-title [ cell ]
[ cell ] latest-post [ cell ]
[ cell ] number-of-posts( CountPages…where parent="thread-title") [ cell ]
[ row ] [ table ]
[[/module]]

Modules within other modules? Now that's really freaky ;)
Not to mention powerful!

I actually wanted to use CountPages inside ListPages and was a bit sad to discover that we can't put modules in other modules. Maybe as inline elements.

Why would we need to show children of children?

To emulate nested comments. But that may be unnecessary: a flat thread is often simplest, and I'm not a great fan of nesting, especially when we put newest comments at the top.

Can support be added for this (modules within modules), or is it technically impossible?

It seems to be a limitation of the parser due to the fact there is weak closure. We'll probably fix this by using [[module name... /]] as an explicit closure for modules that optionally allow a body. ListPages being one.

We'll have to come back to this, it looks like nested modules is inevitable.