I would like to know how I can be of assistance in adding a feature that would be well-loved in Christian and/or religious forums. The feature would be for automatic detection of scripture references, and auto-linking them to an online scripture database such as BlueLetterBible.org, or BibleGateway.com.
I have made a Perl script with the full regex necessary to recognize Bible references by full title, or by abbreviation, including the apocryphal books and Roman numeral notations. The script was designed for the conversion of text or html documents to ThML (Theological Markup Language). It would not be difficult to convert the regex to use for autolinking the scriptural citations within a user's post. This would greatly simplify things by placing the text just a click away from the reader.
This feature could be implemented such that it was either enabled or disabled, and if enabled, the admin should be able to select which of the online databases to link to, and which version of the Bible to use by default. Just this much would satisfy me for now. In the future, we could go a step further and enable user choice of Bible version for his/her own posts, and/or Bible DB.
I'm not fluent with PHP, but would willingly cooperate with the developers to translate the Perl into functionality with the forum code.
Can this go in Version 8? Please?!
