An issue I had with supporting XHTML in my WordPress weblogs is that it can be difficult to control others’ input in comments. I solved the issue with Drupal by not supporting comments directly on posts. Instead, I’ve provided a forum, using the Drupal Forum module, here at RealTech. I’ve only provided the one forum for all of my sites to make it simpler for people to register, as well as follow any active discussions.
To ensure that Forum pages don’t create XHTML errors, I modified the PHP to serve pages as XHTML to exclude URLs that have the word “forum” in them. I realize this will impact on any page with ‘forum’ in the title, such as this page. However, it’s unlikely that I’ll be using inline SVG and the word “forum” in the title for the same post.
header("Vary: Accept");
if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"], "application/xhtml+xml"))
if (stristr($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],"forum"))
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
else
header("Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8");
else
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
In addition, I turned filtered HTML on for forum entries, as well as installed htmLawed, to ensure that the entries are as clean as possible. Regardless, a problem in the forums won’t take down a post, and that was my main criteria for making this change.
The forums should also provide a much more flexible communication system. You can use your OpenID to register, or just register directly. You can still comment anonymously, though the comments are moderated.
Typically, any person who registered is an authorized user and could create forum topics. Well, I wasn’t quite ready to make that leap of faith. I created a “trusted” user who can create forum topics and will reserve this user classification to people I know. I then adjusted the permissions to enable forum topic creation for trusted users and admins, only.
I’ve created main forum categories. Over time, I imagine I’ll need to adjust the forum categories to be general enough to be useful, without being so general that it’s difficult to find discussions of interest.
