I've been modifying the classified ads package written by Deds Castillo and Paul Doerwalds (hope I spelled that right). It's still a work-in-progress, but other folks in the community have asked about it, so I thought about committing it to CVS so others can work on it too.

So where should I commit this to? contrib or the main tree (head?).

Deds and Paul did a great job on the package, but there are some loose ends to tie. Here's a list of things that need to be done in the package that I have gathered so far (Deds, feel free to correct me if I misjudged something):

- Needs User interface
        + Need to display categories better
        + Need to give user an interface to create ads
        + Needs a page that shows ads in a category with custom fields
        + Same for editing ads
- Needs to do categorization better
- Needs to fix several "FIXME" left in the code, especially some                                                                                              inneficient queries
- Probably other stuff that I'm forgetting.

-Roberto

AFAICS, the interface currently on the package to create ads is only present on the admin pages, and they are created under no category. Maybe you added other stuff since?

So I adapted part of your admin ad-new pages to take on categories and display an interface. I'll send you a tarball.

-Roberto

Roberto is right in saying that it doesn't relate to adserver in any way.  Classified ads have provisions for extensibility via custom fields so it's aim is to be generic as possible.  This means that you can use it to accomodate real world scenarios where there are categorized products.  I used it for an apartment rental site where the ads are the available rooms, Paul Doerwald used it for a Jobs Posting package and I think Roberto aims to use it for a hierarchical catalog of books.  Notice that each have their own unique properties but also share a common trait -- they being products that can be categorized.

This raises a side issue that you don't need to think about now ... Timo's introducing a generalized categorization facility based on his experience working on the Siemen's ShareNet project and eventually we'll want everything to tie into that I do believe.  Right?  Timo?

This sounds like a great package, very useful, good work guys.

When I was writing it, docs pointed to cr_keywords for categorization of cr-based modules so that's what I used.  Hope that was what you meant by "built-in CR categorization tables and types"? :)

I imported the classified-ads package to the contrib section of the CVS repository.

The package is not quite there for end-user usage yet (but it's very close), so that's why I decided to put it in contrib. Since a release of oacs-4-6 is due soon, I did not want to delay it and I didn't feel like the package should go on HEAD either (nor do I know if it'll work under HEAD).

Deds, sorry about not sending you the tarball before committing to CVS. I forgot that you had asked me to do that. At least now you can check it for yourself.

Deds, I made some changes to how ads are created, so that ads could be added with a category, instead of added with no category then assigned to one.

I will be working in this package heavily in the next few days, so expect the things that need fix under www/doc/index to be worked on. Contributors welcome.

-Roberto

We want to install the classifieds package in Openacs 4.6.3, but the package asks for acs-kernel 4.6.7.

What do we have to do in order to run it in our 4.6.3 version?

Thanks in advance for your help

Samuel