I have built a number of sites with Silverstripe and am fairly addicted to it. up until now i haven't had to build a site with a forum ...

But now the time has come I need to know if silverstripe is the way to go.

My past experience is with Invison Powerboard (IPB) - it is very comprehensive forum software, however overly complicated and not very customisable in some respects.

I love how clean and simple the silverstripe forums are and obviously the best thing about them is that they are integrated into silverstripe cms. However ... I feel they are missing some things and would like to know if these things are possible or will be part of the next release.

WYSIWYG Editor for creating posts (links, basic text formatting, embedded pictures & video) for the non-technical members
Members list
Personal Profiles (with picture gallery)
"view posts since last visit" button
Private message system
Moderator tools - edit, delete, set invisible for posts and topics

have i missed these things on the demo?

Hey Ollie,

The forum module we have keep pretty simple any feature requests you have we would love to see made as a ticket on open.silverstripe.com and patches are most welcome. Let me address the ones raised here

WYSIWYG Editor
We are waiting for some changes to the core which allow us to store the data in a generic format then give the option of users using html or bbcode or whatever language they wish. Although this would be fairly easy to implement in a custom build of the forum though you would just need to change the 'Textarea' to an 'HTMLEditorField' and the DBField to a 'HTMLText' field.

Members list..
http://silverstripe.org/forums/memberlist - accessible by clicking the XXX members under the search form. Basic implementation which shows some fields - its sortable by name, post, join date etc.

Personal Profiles
Something a bit more advanced then http://silverstripe.org/ForumMemberProfile/show/1749 Im guessing? You can extend that page however you want - eg for SS we have the projects, modules, widgets

"view posts since last visit" button
This was in the original module but was stripped out of this one as it didn't work very well. I was thinking of some sort of highlighting posts which have been updated since you were last there rather then just a generic list.

Private message system
See http://silverstripe.org/forum-module-forum/show/260103?start=0#post261921 for a discussion on this.

Moderator tools
Out of the box we provide Moderator tools to edit / delete / mark as spam. You can also make readonly threads, sticky threads and move threads if needed.

Cheers for the info Will.

It seems that it will meet my needs and going with the philosophy that less is more, I love the uncluttered simplicity that it seems to ooze.

with regards to your comment about the "view new posts" button - I think this is a must have on a forum, particularly a busy one. On the forums I frequent it's the first thing i click when i visit the site. Having 'unread' topics highlighted would also be cool.

Anyway, i'll make a ticket on open.ss for any other features.

Has anyone successfully integrated IPB into silverstripe?

this is one of my sites - i was thinking of rebuilding in ss cms but need to be able to migrate the IPB across and if possible link the user database to ss. http://www.bimmersport.co.nz/

@willr

Hi Will!

> Moderator tools
>Out of the box we provide Moderator tools to edit / delete / mark as spam.
> You can also make readonly threads, sticky threads and move threads if needed.

I see moderation work in this forum, but it does not in the latest release of the module, neither in the latest trunk version. There's even a bug filed: http://open.silverstripe.com/ticket/4110

Tested on 2.3.1 and 2.3.2-rc4, with my own theme and blackcandy (just in case).

It's me who's making an error somewhere?

You set the moderators as a comma separated list on the forum page. Eg load the forum page in the CMS and you should get a text box for moderators. Here you are enter the usernames of the moderators (if you have the tagfield module installed you will get a autocomplete popdown list of members).

I don't think you can set which forums they moderate from the security section.

Hi Will!

I'm certainly being blunt, but…
> You set the moderators as a comma separated list on the forum page. Eg load the forum page in the CMS and you should get a text box for moderators.

Do you mean in Forum.php? There is a $has_one = "Moderator" => "Member", and a $many_many = Moderators' => 'Member'. If I understand well the idea, I should add the moderators fields through the getCMSFields() function later, but not ‘comma separated list’ is found in the form field types. A Relation field whould be more appropriate. Anyway, I'll research the idea.

> Here you are enter the usernames of the moderators (if you have the tagfield module installed you will get a autocomplete popdown list of members).

I'll look in the documentation.

> I don't think you can set which forums they moderate from the security section.

Ok, thanks.

Anyway, I've manually added through phpMyAdmin the ID of a Member in the ModeratorID (I have still to understand the Forum_Moderators table and many_many relations, still with no records). When logged in, the moderator can edit posts but when trying to delete a post, the whole thread is deleted. I posted a bug ticket about that.

Are you sure there's nothing fishy in the actual code? It seems a bit difficult for beginners to add the Moderator feature, a basic one.

Best regards,
Juan

Are you sure there's nothing fishy in the actual code? It seems a bit difficult for beginners to add the Moderator feature, a basic one.

Well how its implemented should make it pretty easy to add moderators to the forum. You login to the cms (as an admin) and open a forum page and you type the members names. (Note I did just check and you indeed require the TagField module to add moderators. I will add a note on the wiki - also there should be a fall back. If you don't have the tagfield installed it shouldn't just kill the functionality :)) See line 150-166 in Forum.php as to were it tries to add a cms field.

So you shouldn't need to touch a line of code to get moderators working (just install the tagfield module)

Thanks Will!

Adding TagField module simplified the task of adding Moderators. Nevertheless, several features still do no work:
Critical:
— Trying to check Sticky Threads and Read-only breaks the site.
— Different Forums (per language) in multi-language sites are difficult to manage, since pages as ‘my profile’ are not language aware (i.e. trying to see a member's profile in a translated page changes the whole page to the default language).
Glitches:
— ‘Moderated Forums’ in the Member profile in the CMS does not show anything.
— Auto-complete in the ‘Moderators for this forum’ field in the Forum page in the CMS does not proposes names, just confirm that the typed one is in the database.

I'm using 2.3.2rc4 and the latest Forum trunk.

Bets regards,
Juan