I once already asked about that via mail, but maybe it is better to ask in the forum

We, as in Akonadi developers, would be interested to know whether the forum has some kind of machine API, e.g. something a program could use to retrieve forum structure and articles.

The idea is to write an Akonadi resource which would:
- make the user list (or just buddy list) available as an address book
- make forums available as "newsgroups"
- make postings availble as "newsgroups postings"

Main target group would be developers who prefer efficient plain text communication.

We might have the opportunity to get this developed as part of a student project at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France.
In this regard it would also be interesting to know whether you have some test instance (to avoid affecting the main forum instance during tests) or how difficult it would be to setup such a thing.

Cheers,
_

For reference, one of our admins, neverendingo, is working on Open Collaboration Services (OCS) integration with the forum. You should probably get in touch with him to see where we stand on this exactly (PM should do).

PM sent.

What about the test server/instance? Does such thing exist or how difficult would it be for those students to set one up themselves?

EDIT: we just found this thread
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... 45&start=0

Not sure if this works with your version of the board software.

Cheers,
_

We have indeed a test server running (indeed even more than one). I think it shouldn't be a big problem to give your students access to it.

Regarding your link (thanks for it btw), this involves a different API than we planned to integrate. OCS is based on REST, this mod is a XMLRPC. Though it is really worth a look, will soon do.

To give you a look at what OCS can provide, see the spec here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifi ... n-services

As you can see these are simple url calls with a xml feedback. About the expected timeframe, i can't say much about it, still some things to work out before this can work.

In case you'd like to give the XMLRPC mod a try and want me to test it, maybe even with setting it up on one of our test boards, feel free to ask me here, via PM or our team channel (#kde-forum, freenode).

Cheers,