Is there an API?

Had the forum software got an exposed API?
Could we build standalone apps around the forum?

Nope, but there should be shouldn't there.

In fact, if this forum was made today it would have just such a thing... and it's kinda mad that it doesn't exist.

And now you edge into the craziness of vBulletin and the company that own them, and how they haven't done anything useful to improve the software in the longest time.

And then you get into the politics of it all, as one of the key devs on vBulletin left ages ago and started to write a new product from the ground-up in the right way.

That new product is called XenForo, and it's pretty damn sweet. But it's not ready for LFGSS levels of traffic and is still in beta. But XenForo will have a much richer interface (like... an interface rather than just HTML).

As soon as XenForo is ready I'll jump... but until then we're stuck on an older version of vBulletin and it lacks some really needed functionality and there's nothing in the works for it.

All that said... if you wanted to build an API I'd give you a copy of the software. Note: It's in PHP and within 6 months I'll hopefully move to XenForo in which case we'd need you to build the API again.

You can basically tell that I'm betting long on XenForo as I'm working on a hack to get all of the rich media embedding stuff working as well as the affiliate scheme stuff.

This uses the definitions for maps you did last week too:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/urlrewriter-auto-media-embed-and-affiliate-schemes.8292/

So I've kinda wound down dev on vBulletin and am putting dev effort into getting XenForo ready.

Whilst XenForo is PHP, it's really elegant code by and large. It also allows a kind of chain of responsibility based dependency injection.

One of the things that would be very easy on XenForo is that even before an official API was finished a style sheet could be made that basically just echo'd the content as json... thus using a stylesheet could make a read-only API for the whole site with predictable URLs. This would open up a lot of basic functionality even before the full write interface was built.

Velocio - XenForo was at the most basic stage when I last checked it out which wouldn't be much use at the moment for the site I currently run because it'd strip out so much stuff that was already part of vbulletin 3 - but Jelsoft's behaviour over VB4 has guaranteed that there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'll give them any more money. I wanted to switch to XenForo but I don't want to end up with a monster coding project on my hands to hack in all the stuff we're already using on vb3. How is XenForo on the features front now? There's not a lot of info on their site about it (guess because it's still in beta).

10 for n=1 to 10
20 print "look, I can program"
30 next

Let me know if you guys need any help.

10 for n=1 to 10
20 print "look, I can program"
30 next

Just popped this into Google Translate but am none the wiser.

Didn't you forget
Run ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqBmvnzJMuE

Just popped this into Google Translate but am none the wiser.

Beginners all-purpose symbolic instruction code (B.A.S.I.C).

10 print "hippy is fat"
20 goto 10
run

10 print "hippy is fat"
20 goto 10
run

Nice work.

Velocio - XenForo was at the most basic stage when I last checked it out which wouldn't be much use at the moment for the site I currently run because it'd strip out so much stuff that was already part of vbulletin 3 - but Jelsoft's behaviour over VB4 has guaranteed that there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'll give them any more money. I wanted to switch to XenForo but I don't want to end up with a monster coding project on my hands to hack in all the stuff we're already using on vb3. How is XenForo on the features front now? There's not a lot of info on their site about it (guess because it's still in beta).

There's still lots of things missing.

Obvious things:

• Inline edit of thread titles
  
• A way to jump from a user profile to the user admin pane
  
• User promotions (auto move users from one user group to another based on some arbitrary criteria)
  
• Auto media embed and affiliate schemes (I'm working on this)
  
• User settings (stuff like being able to hide avatars)
  
• Sphinx search (fast text search to enable InnoDB storage)
  
• Memcache (cache settings to reduce DB queries)
  
• Post cache (composable front end to permit caching of all parsed posts)
  
  
  

But then there are loads of things it already does better like the whole plug-in architecture, all of the HTML, the stylesheeting and templating in general, the forum hierarchy as a node tree that could include pages, etc.

The pace of development and people behind it are the 2 things that make me think not only will it catch up to vBulletin fast, but it will surge past it too.

Just popped this into Google Translate but am none the wiser.

Repped, for non nerdiness.

Yep, fully RESTful API supporting all http verbs, HATEOAS discoverable state traversal, http conflicts, custom mediatypes etc.

What a wonderful world that would be.

Then we'd have some motherfucking Apps, that's for sure.

You guys can write it if you want.

Maybe next year when I quit work.

Doesn't vBulletin have a (rather janky) REST API built in?

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/content.php/334-mobile-api

Was looking this up, thinking of some sort of LFGSS android app ;)

It doesn't.

It has a poor implementation of feeds, but as that's oriented around serving RSS style content (just the latest, just an index of it), it's effectively crap.

Lack of API is the biggest motivator to build new software.

Had the forum software got an exposed API?
Could we build standalone apps around the forum?

What sort of apps do you have in mind?

Something akin to Twatter would keep the kids occupied. No seriously.
http://www.twat.me.uk/