RE: Approach to atompub implementation for a forum

["Brian Smith" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ivan Sagalaev wrote:
> Brian Smith wrote:

<snip>

> If I have forums as collections then both replies to existing 
> topics and new topics would be POSTs to the same collections. 

This assumption might come back to bite you later, when/if you separate subscription feeds from the collection feeds--you might have an entry from the subscription feed that you want to reply to, but you don't know what collection it belongs to. It is better to reify this assumption as an explicit link.

> The only difference would be that:
> 
> - topics require title and cannot have "hr:in-reply-to"
> - replies can't have title but have to have "hr:in-reply-to"
> 
> Seems sane?

Yes, this is what I am doing, except that my server sets the title of every reply to "re: {topic-title}".

> > These approaches are not mutually exclusive. A topic can be 
> a collection, an entry, and a feed at the same time.
> My point is to make it automatically discoverable. I thought 
> there's an established way to say: "this forum entry is a 
> topic with some title, but it's URI works also as a 
> collection for posts". But from your email that there's no 
> established semantics of this kind

Look at the GData multifeed mechanism, it does something like this. But, I think there is no reason to make each topic its own collection.

- Brian