This is on­ly the first part of a project to cre­ate the sim­plest (for me) soft­ware fo­rum pos­si­ble.

Here are the fea­tures I wan­t:

• Lo­­gin us­ing twit­ter / Face­­book / Google / OpenID

• Un­lim­it­ed num­ber of threads

• Sup­­port for like / dis­­­like both on threads and on posts

• Avatars

• HTML in com­­ments

• Mail the us­er on replies

• RSS feeds for threads

You can see it in ac­tion at http://­foro.net­man­ager­s.­com.ar (for a lim­it­ed time on­ly ;-)

And here is the code:

import bottle
import disqusapi as disqus
import json
shortname = 'magicmisteryforum'
api = disqus.DisqusAPI(open("key").read().strip())

@bottle.route('/', method='GET')
def index():
    msg = bottle.request.GET.get('msg', '')
    threads = api.forums.listThreads(forum=shortname, limit=100)
    print threads[0]
    return bottle.template('main.tpl', threads=threads, shortname=shortname, msg=msg)

@bottle.route('/new', method='POST')
def new():
    title = bottle.request.forms.get('title', None)
    if not title:
        bottle.redirect('/?msg=Missing%20Thread%20Name')
        return
    thread = api.threads.create(forum=shortname, title = title)
    thread_id = thread.__dict__['response']['id']
    # Redirecting to /thread/thread_id doesn't work
    # because threads take a few seconds to appear on the listing
    bottle.redirect('/')

@bottle.route('/thread/:id')
def thread(id):
    t = api.threads.details(thread=id)
    return bottle.template('thread.tpl', shortname=shortname, id=id, thread=t.__dict__['response'])

@bottle.route('/static/:path#.+#')
def server_static(path):
    return bottle.static_file(path, root='./static')

app = bottle.app()
app.catchall = False #Now most exceptions are re-raised within bottle.
bottle.run(host='184.82.108.14', port=80, app=app)

It re­quires Bot­tle and the Dis­qus python API

Of course, there is al­so a bit of tem­plat­ing in­volved, here is main.t­pl and the thread­.t­pl. Since I suck at HTM­L, it us­es Bluetrip CSS and it's more than sim­ple enough to cus­tom­ize.

OF COURSE I AM CHEAT­ING!

This thing is just a sim­ple ve­neer around Dis­qus! More like a blog with com­ments and with­out posts than a fo­rum! But ... what's miss­ing to make this a re­al fo­rum? It work­s, does­n't it? You could even use Dis­qus cat­e­gories to cre­ate sub­fo­rum­s...

All things con­sid­ered, I think it's a cute hack.

And if you wait a few days, this will lead to some­thing much more mag­i­cal!

Full source code at http://­mag­ic­fo­rum.­google­code.­com