Like every other web app, ProjectForum is filled with way too many web forms. Also like every other web app, there's an internal framework which helps with rendering forms in a consistent way. In this case it's a home-grown evolved-over-time thing, rather than one of the huge number of existing form libraries, application frameworks, etc. Over time its done a bit more and a bit more, and because its so widely used in the app, is usually a good candidate for improvements.
Forms processing (i.e. what happens when things are submitted) has still been done fairly manually. It's not like its complicated code or anything, as anyone who has done form processing in a scripting language knows. But it gets fairly bulky fairly quickly, and to do things like add a new form element you normally need to change things in several different places in the code file (at the top where the variables are extracted, in the forms processing/validation part, and in the form display part). Like I said, easy to read, but gets monotonous.
Been playing around a bit with making this into a slightly higher level library, that would take care of the processing etc. for you; instead you'd just say here are all the fields for the forms, labels, type of input control, how to get or set the value, etc. API-wise it looks like it'll be easier (cuts the form code almost in half), and removes a lot of duplication. It's probably bordering on the edge of over-engineering, given the "problem" it solves, while widespread, is not that severe in any single occurrence.
On the plus side, the old form generation library code is creaky and has a sub-par API, and of course, there's the age old argument that this code could all be gloriously reused in so many other applications (cough). And we know of course that the best frameworks are those extracted from real apps... (cough cough). But also, even if things are a bit overdone, its more psychologically pleasing (translation: less motivation required) to work on code that's had a bit of extra attention paid to it.
