This forum is a mess!

I also use google allot but a "better" search feature in Discuss with dates will be nice (if there is a private github version). Dunno if that will hurt the speed allot..

Quote from: nuan88 at Feb 03, 2015, 10:52 AM

whitebyte, my (minor) complaint about the forum is that its hard to find updated info.

Well, to be honest it seems wasteful to dig deeply into this special instance of discuss. If some trusted members could be allowed into the files to fix a couple of specific things, that would be good. The discuss is slated for upgrade at some point in the future, and I suspect, given that its a custom install, that documentation is lacking.

Something like search, it would be nice to have a native search function, but its not necessary with google able to help us narrow search results by time.

There are some good points here. Non-English forums are something that you're not going to get in StackOverflow/Exchange.

We could probably make the MODX Discuss project public. There's nothing in there that's secret sauce per se. It's just been kept aside because it was an internal project. One of the major problems, however, is updating Discuss is not as easy as it should be and due to the tight coupling to modx.com it puts the whole site at risk if it fails.

On a project we've been working on we managed to get elegant SSO done with Vanilla which is what we originally planned to build the forums with back in 2011. But at that time, SSO was nearly impossible.

Do we need native forums? I am not sure. If so, I'd think it wiser to take on Discuss2 if someone wanted to build something better than what's here. It's more efficient and more useful.

Search in the forums here are using Solr but they are not properly set up and I don't know if anyone has the time or knowledge to deal with Solr. The people who set it up are no longer here.

The more I discuss things like this, the more I think we need to somehow get all these pieces isolated for better management.

Jay, could you tell us something about the condition now of Discuss2?

I believe I stand for a lot of people who use and will/would use Discuss. Unfortunately most are not vocal, so I am extra vocal as a result haha. We just got two people confirm the other week that they are using Discuss with the latest Revo and got it off that compatibility board. The user base is out there and the competing products all have significant weaknesses.

We might build up enough momentum to get it finalized and ready for use, given a lot of time and some commitment from important quarters. :nudge:

I of course hope there will be enough commitment for a native solution. Jay, the biggest problem with Discuss is documentation, by far. It was dumped on a community that at that time maybe was a little too small. I am not sure how that happened, 3 years ago I was not worried about forums, but there was no follow up from anyone. I am not blaming anyone, but them's the facts.

Jay, I have *already* provided a recent/hot posts tool, (to replace the native one which has no documentation and no one knows how it works), a User Badges tool like Vanilla, and a User Title tool, each of which is pretty much just 20-50 lines of php, so a couple hours of work, or 20 minutes for BobRay. Well, they are simple but its a start at least.

I am not trying to show off at all, pls don't think that, my point is, look how close Discuss is *already*, and that's with having to work around the gaps due to the lack of documentation. The bells and whistles that Discuss is missing compared to Vanilla are not a big barrier. Add a couple php tools here and there, fix a couple bugs, find some lost documentation and this thing could be shining!~


I don't really think Vanilla is a solution. It is a niche leader now I guess, but its not very good software to be honest and has limited freedom of customization. Its got *one* very long routine and you can only really change stuff through css {display:hidden} unless you get deep into the smarty php library, my php guy really complained about it when I asked him to get me started with just *one* custom page. Plus they are just pimping for their paid service anyway. They won't be leading their niche 10 years from now with that, I don't think. I looked deeply at Vanilla before coming back to Discuss (I was already a long-time MODX user but felt that Discuss was a little too raw).

Plus, users of MODX will def want to try and integrate with many forum solutions, less so if there is a rocking native solution tho.

Any updates on this? The topic is 8 month old, and AFAIK nothing has changed?

Quote from: whitebyte at Feb 02, 2015, 06:56 PM

shifting to StackExchange

Sounds good, using StackOverflow as an "official" QA board is a common practice these days.

I'd also agree that a MODx StackExchange website (or similar, maybe OSQA - it sort of doesn't feel right that StackExchange runs on Microsoft technologies.. :-( ) would be very useful.

Unfortunately it often does seem to be quite hard to find the answers that you're looking for on the MODx forums: partly because the userbase is split between the different Evo and Revo branches (we're still using Evo as we have very limited web development resources such that we are unable to devote the required time to such a major platform change)), and I think partly because there are so many sub-forums, and, finally, search results often bring up old threads more often than newer ones.

StackExchange seems to work quite well in that it allows topics to be re-edited to provide better or more up-to-date solutions, and also in that it does a very good job of highlighting relevant related topics so that you can often find a useful answer fairly quickly (or easily provide updated information yourself, if you have something useful to add).

I am not ignoring this thread. I just don't get into the forums all that often these days. The MODX team doesn't have the resources to work on Discuss 2. If there's anything we've learned over the years, we can't do it all. There are already nearly a dozen old Extras that need adoption because splittingred has moved on. I think, realistically, if people wish to move Discuss 1/2 over, it would be well served to be forked by one or more community members who can own it.

I am not writing off the use of Discuss on the MODX Forums either. I just brought up a couple ideas as potential alternatives. I personally am not a developer and can do little more than adjust the theming of Discuss, so for me to help, is challenging at best.

Jay, I think that's a great idea! However access has to be provided from your side. BobRay asked for *very* limited access to Discuss code so he could figure out how to fix a couple of these annoying bugs, but no result yet.

I am also not a developer, but I assume not everything relevant to Discuss2 are already in the public repositories. Or am I wrong about that?

Quote from: BobRay at Feb 02, 2015, 10:50 PM

I suspect that it would be harder to find things on StackOverflow, but I can see why you'd want to do it.

With respect to the Discuss code, I assume that you have a private GitHub repository somewhere for Discuss (or could easily create one). If selected people were allowed to fork that, they could probably tell you how to fix the issues (or better yet, issue pull requests to fix them). That shouldn't compromise the modx.com site at all, and if you don't give them rights to modify the repo directly, it can't hurt Discuss either.

There are only a couple of problems in Discuss that I still care about. I suspect that at least one of them would be a pretty easy fix.

This is the only repo for the original Discuss: https://github.com/modxcms/Discuss the theme-modx branch contains the forums.modx.com specific files. It is exactly how and where I make changes to the forums here. I am not much of a developer but have enough experience with php/git that I can work on this.

We're using a combination of the themes under the /core/components/discuss/themes/modx.

I started playing with D2 yesterday. It doesn't work well in 2.3. @the_dunnock has said he may take a look at it to see about getting it to work. Not sure though. I'd like to try to get it running locally. [ed. note: smashingred last edited this post 9 years, 1 month ago.]

Thank you Jay. Really appreciate your support.