School Center

Tuesday, February 27, 2001, at 09:02AM

By Eric Richardson

Today I was evaluating a product called School Center to see if it would work for NM. As they took me through it, it kept striking me that basically what they had written had the same architecture as #{node "7"}eThreads#{/node}.

It was sort of freaky how close the two actually are in their designs. Same backend runs everything, content is molded by different modules that determine how it's laid out. All admin is web based. User rights are recursive down trees. That's the School Center software. That's also eThreads.

It also seemed that from everything I could see about their architecture, eThreads is much more elegant. Their URLs are riddled with blah.asp?sectionid=5424&something=foo, whereas eThreads sticks to the nice, simple (and more search-engine friendly) /view/parent/child/. The look templates in eThreads also seemed much more powerful.

I couldn't help but spend the whole time I was on the phone with them wondering how much work it would be to make eThreads do what their software does. I can't seem to come to any conclusion other than that it wouldn't be hard, so I'm going to take a stab at it.

The first step is to finish getting all forum code out of the core. At that point I'll write a couple easy modules to do stuff like static pages. We'll see where things go from there.