Geeklog Forums

I intend to open a new site soon for short stories -- uploads of 3,000 to ten thousand words. Authors should be able to upload large plaintext or html format files. Commentary and discussion would take place in the replies. I'm only minimally familiar with php and MySQL. I am learning them, but at present I shouldn't be hacking around inside a meg or two of professional code.

Will GeekLog handle such traffic? Are the articles themselves stored in the MySQL database? Is GeekLog the tool I need?

Am I going in the right direction with GeekLog 1.3, or should I be looking in some other direction altogether?

Thanks for any insight you can give me.

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-- John

For Geeklog 1.3, there will most likely be an uploading facility for things such as image and zip files to attach to stories. The idea of a text file parser though is interesting. It would allow the user to write the story offline in plain text or GLML (HTML will be disabled in the next version - for a good reason) and then upload it, and geeklog would automatically generate a story from this text, say grab the first 250 words, or first paragraph and make it the intro text. Definetly something to think about, but maybe for a 1.3.1 release (1.3 is starting to get feature creep!)

Yes, they are stored in the database. Yes, I think it would be a cool feature to allow file-based articles for inordinately large files to be uploaded complete with images. However, I agree with Tane that it would have to be a post 1.3 release. Whether or not you want to use Geeklog would depend on the DBMS you will use. Currently we only gaurantee mysql support though we have someone implementing postgresql support and it would be easy to port to bigger, more robust DBMS's (ala SQL Server or Oracle). If they can handle large text fields OK then I think you'd be fine. My hunch is MySQL will work ok for you for quite a while until your site gets a lot of traffic.

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The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Great article

With GLML some thought should be given to what is a intro. Is it a paragraph? A fixed limit of charactors? A [intro] tag? Or does it remain seperate blocks?

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You are all a bunch of freaks!

One idea about the intro or 'teaser' paragraph... If it were a short story scenario like I described, then it would be champion if an editor (moderator) could construct the blurb. Maybe it would be an excerpt from the body of a story, or a chunk of 'about the author' text. Does it always have to be the first X number of words from the article itself? Regarding an upload class, that could be a nasty exercise couldn't it? Wouldn't someone upload a word processing document formatted with who know what? There's a queue in GeekLog isn't there, that traps posts so an editor can massage it before publication?

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-- John

Maybe I'm mis-stating this, but are the articles poked into MySQL with a construct like BLOB or TEXT which have a size limit if I'm not mistaken. Isn't that why tere's TINY, MEDIUM, and LONG variants -- to tweak the column size.

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-- John

Geeklog's uses MySQL text object. See MySQL's Website to get specific information on data types and their sizes.

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The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Yes, there is a moderation queue that stops posts getting onto the site without the moderators approval. As for people uploading word documents, either you have to build a .DOC parser, or make it VERY clear on your site you only accept text or GLML formatted posts (see the stuff about GLML to find out).