Sylbi 0.11

Sylbi is a conversation system built with Perl and MySQL.

Not a forum, and not a blogging platform -- instead, actually both -- Sylbi grew from the idea that a blog with comments and a forum only differ in their perspective of the conversation.

Blogs with comments and forums both provide:

· a chronological set of postings,
· initiated by someone, and,
· (potentially) replied to by others

The main difference is the perspective they present. A blog presents the perspective of the owner(s) of the blog, while a forum presents the perspective of the forum and a topic defined in the forum.

Other than that, they perform essentially the same function. They allow people to start conversations, or get involved in existing ones.

Sylbi works as follows. First, a definition.

Conversation
A chronological list of posts, where there is a starting post (entry) and one or more replying posts (responses)

1. A site using Sylbi defines topic buckets (or topics, categories, whichever you prefer), indicating what the site creator wants his or her site to be about. This can be as broad or as narrow as the owner of the site wants. Conversations end up in topic buckets.

2. Users sign up and begin posting and replying to conversations. They do not have to pick a category in which to start conversations, like most forums require. They just begin posting, as if they had a blog (which in fact they do).

3. Site moderators train the site to predict which conversations go into which topic bucket by manually adding conversations to the appropriate bucket. Over time, Sylbi will be able to move the conversations to the right bucket without the moderator's help.

4. Sylbi offers two perspectives, or views, of conversations. It presents the forum view, where a user may select a topic bucket to find conversations, and it presents the blog view, where a user may view all the conversations started by a particular user of the system.

5. Users may customize their "blog" site (view) by modifying templates. This lets them retain their individuality while still participating in the community. Their conversations exist on their "blog", and also in the topic buckets of the site (in the "forum").

What's New in This Release:

· This release adds edit functionality. Users can now edit posts that they own.



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