Thought I would relate my experience getting Gossamer Forums up and going. Purchased it on Friday and was experimenting with layouts all weekend long. Had a shell up and running very quickly with my site's general look and feel integrated. That turned out to be very easy given the template design of Gossamer. Some moderate to significant problems were fixed over the holiday weekend by Gossamer staff (how's that for service).
The biggest challenge was to bring over my old forum. When I first installed a message board on my web site, I did not know if it would be viable or not. So, I went cheap and was using the freeware version of Discus (www.discusware.com).
This worked fine until the site and my users outgrew it. No user accounts, no e-mail functionality, and no delimited file format. The entire board was stored in a series of flat HTML documents (tables) and most critical to migrating to Gossamer - it was a linear system model not a threaded one.
Say it with me, "getting text data out of formated html is not fun". It looked so bad that I considered just writing off the 3,000+ posts from the old board. In stepped my much smarter programmer who wrote a very slick dhtml DOM (document object model) script.
All I had to do was wrap the script around the html tables (all 138 of them) and open the document in IE. The script processed through the html DOM pulling out the text data, then using ADO it logged into the SQL server and appended the posts into the appropriate tables while also establishing the linkage to the view history and updating the forum counts etc.. - all ran from within the IE browser.
Call me one very impressed and happy camper!
Launched the forum live to the world this morning and am spending my afternoon dealing with problems that only can be discovered by users of varying skill levels.
I am really looking forward to the continued development of this platform and bugging all of you with my questions.
-Very pleased customer (send all endorsement monies to me in Euros please)
The biggest challenge was to bring over my old forum. When I first installed a message board on my web site, I did not know if it would be viable or not. So, I went cheap and was using the freeware version of Discus (www.discusware.com).
This worked fine until the site and my users outgrew it. No user accounts, no e-mail functionality, and no delimited file format. The entire board was stored in a series of flat HTML documents (tables) and most critical to migrating to Gossamer - it was a linear system model not a threaded one.
Say it with me, "getting text data out of formated html is not fun". It looked so bad that I considered just writing off the 3,000+ posts from the old board. In stepped my much smarter programmer who wrote a very slick dhtml DOM (document object model) script.
All I had to do was wrap the script around the html tables (all 138 of them) and open the document in IE. The script processed through the html DOM pulling out the text data, then using ADO it logged into the SQL server and appended the posts into the appropriate tables while also establishing the linkage to the view history and updating the forum counts etc.. - all ran from within the IE browser.
Call me one very impressed and happy camper!
Launched the forum live to the world this morning and am spending my afternoon dealing with problems that only can be discovered by users of varying skill levels.
I am really looking forward to the continued development of this platform and bugging all of you with my questions.
-Very pleased customer (send all endorsement monies to me in Euros please)
Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus