SINS

SINS is not SFIM

You could also probably say that SINS is what it is because because the developers have prefered readability at the expense of speed, even when the majority of programmers looking over the code base would have understand the mildly faster version. The SINS codebase is not witty or clever. Depending on the programmer, they might not even find it elegant. SINS, however, should be approachable even by programmers who aren't very familiar with some of the common things that most programmers do.

Well if it's not SFIM then what is it?

It's forum software based on SFIM. In fact it's the reference implementation of SFIM. It is built using Python because Python is readable. It is based on Pyramid because Pyramid is flexible. It uses Mako because Mako is readable. It uses SQLalchemy because SQLalchemy is easy.

Okay, but what exactly is SFIM?

SFIM is a forum standard that is intended to be well document and easy to build interfaces for. The dream of SFIM is to allow users to interact with SFIM based forums in consistent ways while SFIM implementers can use languages that they are comfortable with using tools that offer different experiences in terms of responsiveness. The ultimate goal is to allow for smartphone apps that can easily interact with SFIM based forums.

What is done?

The database models are written.
Templates are using bootstrap

What is left to do?

Most of the logic that uses the models needs to be written.
Forms need to be used

Getting Started With SINS

For contributors:

Make sure python is installed on your system.
Create a directory for a virtual environment. An example of what this might be like is "web-app"
Run the following command python easy_install virtualenv
Change directories into the directory you created for your virtual environment.
Clone this repository in the usual way. Make sure that SINS resides in a directory inside of the virtual environment directory.
The directory for the virtual environment will from now on be referred to as $VENV. If you cannot create a session variable for whatever reason, replace $VENV with the path to this directory.
Run these commands:

cd $VENV/sins <- This might be SINS $VENV/bin/python setup.py develop

Running

SINS is not currently in a state where it can run. It also needs to be run in a virtual environment. For this, follow the instructions that have been provided to contributors all the way to step six. Instead of step seven, run the following commands:

cd $VENV/sins
$VENV/bin/python setup.py
$VENV/bin/initialize_sins_db production.ini

Licensing

SINS is available under an MIT license.

Credits

Special thanks go to Cody N Vaughn for helping me design a few of the non SFIM dictated portions of this program. He was much more help than he probably ever realized.

More thanks also go to Brock Jahnke, who helped me design SFIM and helped me figure out what the key features for SINS should be.

Also thanks to Jan Pierce, who gave me a reason to see this project through to the end. It may not be there yet, but if it does get there it will be because of the opportunity I have been given.

riggtravis/SINS