Forum already built in!?

Just a thought...

Isn’t a page with user comments pretty much like a thread in a forum? (Functionality that seems to already be built in to MODx) How difficult would it be to create a category in the nav called "forums" and then sub-folders for the actual forum categories and allow registered users to create "pages" (=threads) within?

It might not be a robust as a fully-featured forum, but it should be fine for most commercial sites (support forums etc.) and I guess additional functionality could come from modules... snippets. This seems to keep with the application framework ’spirit’ of modx.

It’d be totally doable. However, once you get past a few users, you get into forum maintenance and management issues. But I’ve too had the same exact thought!

But I’ve too had the same exact thought!

It’s good to know that it wasn’t a completly stupid thought!

Exactly what kind of maintenance and management issues, though? From a moderation point of view... It seems that we can move pages (threads) + edit, disable, delete...

philpond, not stupid at all, look at Vanilla which is a light forum that looks just like a blog with comments and basic user administration...

You lack reply with quotes, and many administrative feature but it could work for commercial websites alright...

Back to administrative issues, it’s not that it wouldn’t be doable, but it could get time consuming "doing it by hand" as you suggest... it depends on how many users and messages.

Exactly David. For light loads, it’d be great... in fact we’re adapting a very similar concept for our file repository at the moment, as it won’t require massive loads/updates once set up.

We could never run this support site on it... the extra overhead of all the extra fields in the tables would make up for a lot of extra (empty) data alone!

Thanks to you both for your thoughtful replies. I am really impressed with the community here, so far.

I guess this type of forum probably wouldn’t be powerful enough to suit my needs. It’s better to find out now than after a hundred hours of development time, however

The reason I was asking it because I am looking for a css-driven Forum that will integrate seemlessly into a community site that I am building (a personal project of mine). It looks like you guys are integrating SMF as we speak, but PunBB (My current 1st choice) looks a little further down the road. On the plus side, SMF appears to have an interated event-calender (something else I am looking for) so maybe I can create a css-layout mod for it.

@David I did check out that Vanilla forum once before (found it via another post in this forum, actualy!). It looks pretty sweet -- I notice that they have ’borrowed’ the design/interaction concepts from 37signals line of products.

Couldn’t a cron be set up to just delete the new threads after "x" amount of days?

I like the vanial forum, even though it’s not robust enough in terms of features, but it’s robust enough in terms of integration with other software. I read the forums, and found out that it’s a lot easier to integrate the forum with exsitng user system, but we need to wait for the next release.

Hope it’s true...


Regards,
Wendy Novianto

Many people are inspired by what 37signals have done, and it’s only normal considering they have an habit of setting the trend lately Another light forum but less original is MiniBB. Or you could just run a test of BBpress, the wordpress guys light forum.

On forum choice, PunBB also has my preference because it’s fast, reliable, secure and has some nice mods. Less features but fully tableless, Unclassified News Board it has some nice ones like native Jabber IM notification, real unread posts selection without cookies, thread bookmarking, native ignore forums/ignore topics...

Quote from: philpond at Nov 29, 2005, 11:16 AM

(...) @David I did check out that Vanilla forum once before (found it via another post in this forum, actualy!). It looks pretty sweet -- I notice that they have ’borrowed’ the design/interaction concepts from 37signals line of products.

I’ve seen wordpress mu and bbpress integration where multiple users can create blogs and add to forums from one login account... Also, this is through one install on a server for multiple domains.
Has this ever been done with modx?
If so, how?