Overview

tjTalk is a school question forum that I am writing for my school Systems Lab Research Project. It is being written in Zope 3, an object oriented web development platform based on Python, XML and HTML. It is being built on top of the SchoolTool school information system. Published under the GNU GPLv3. Available as a project on Launchpad.

A running development server is being hosted at http://tjtalk.misato.us , courtesy of Arlington Public Schools, which got me a VM to run tjTalk on in a matter of hours.

Contact me if you want to be a tester and get an account on this instance.

"School Question Forum" ...What?!

What I mean by a school question forum is that tjTalk is a forum made for students asking questions about schoolwork. It will function somewhat like Yahoo! ® Answers does, except more through a forum kind of structure. Topics of discussion are contained in a "tree" of sorts, being able to traverse for example "English > Writing > Grammar" to get to the proper place to find questions and answers about English grammar. These questions and answers are all anonymous to the other students, with names being displayed only for those with security clearance (teachers and admins). Each answer can also be voted up or down by the other users, and a vote boosts both the answer's score and the score of the author of the answer. The scores can be viewed by all users, so they will always know who is a more reliable source of true answers, and who isn't.

tjTalk is currently in development. If you would like to run it (not reccommended at the moment), instructions on setting up a development instance are below.

Current Project Status

A list of my changes can be seen here on launchpad .

Current stable features:

• Tree-based forum structure
• Basic category page templates
• Comprehensive question page templates
• Questions and answers - basic functionality
• Answers can be voted up/down
• Voting security - no double votes, voting for your own answers, etc
• Comprehensive/prettier category page templates
• Ability to follow questions for updates (bookmarks)
• Alpha server

Upcoming features:

• User scores (infrastructure done, need way to actually view them)
• User-specific tjTalk welcome page (almost done)

Later features:

• Searching (Intelligent!) (in progress)
• MORE of UI fixes
• Beta server

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Installation Instructions

Of late, I have written an installation script for installing tjTalk on Ubuntu or Debian machines with a single command. This is the resulting script. If you're not an Ubuntu or Debian user, I'd be happy to help you get tjTalk working on your machine (e-mail me!). I have no expertise, however, in installing tjTalk on a non-Linux machine. The steps to install:

1. Download it to where you will want tjTalk installed. The installer will create its own subdirectory to put the stuff in, so no need to worry about that.
2. Make it runnable:
   fsufitch@ubuntu ~/ $ chmod +x tjtalk_install_stapp2008spring
3. Run it!
   fsufitch@ubuntu ~/ $ ./tjtalk_install_stapp2008spring
4. ?
5. Profit!

Everything is now installed. Whenever you need to run the server, just go to the directory tjTalk installed itself into (by default tjtalk-src) and type:

The instance will be found on port 7080 on whatever machine you're on right now. A note of significance: tjTalk doesn't initialize itself, so clicking on the tjTalk link in SchoolTool will most likely crash. To fix this, you will need to go to the address http://<your instance >/dostuff.html and click on the button there.

To update your source code to make sure you have the latest fixes and features, run:

And, in case you somehow manage to break the Zope database, or an update breaks it, you can clear it:

More information on configuring the SchoolTool server to run on normal ports (not 7080) and other such nitpicky things can be found at its website .