Vanderkleijn .net

Lots of people have asked for a forum plugin in the past or have asked how they can integrate an existing forum into Wolf CMS. The sad fact of the matter is that most forum software out there doesn't really take integration into account. Many do take into account that you might want to change the forum's look and feel, but using the same user account for both the site and forum (single sign on) is something that is usually out of scope.

Because of that and since I thought it'd create a nice side project, I decided to write this Forum plugin.

NOTE: this first release is an ALPHA / DEVELOPMENT release and not suitable for production use yet. This release will only run on Wolf CMS SVN revision 64 and up.

Why did I put this release out there if its not done? Because a number of people asked me too. The first final & stable release will coincide with the release of Wolf CMS version 0.6.0.

Feature list

• Multiple forums.
• Multiple topics.
• User details screen.
• All posts by users xyz screen.
• Post, view and user counts.
• Creating new topics.
• Replying to topics.
• I18N (internationalization) support and per-user language preference for the user interface.
• Easy configuration through a settings screen.

NOTE: this plugin's release is not ready for production use, please see the NOTES section!

This plugin REQUIRES Wolf CMS version 0.6.0 or higher. (SVN revision 64 and up)

Installation

Download this release from the plugin's page or from the main downloads page.

You can install this plugin in 3 easy steps.

1. Unzip and upload this plugin to the Wolf CMS plugins directory.
2. Access the Wolf CMS Administration screen and activate the plugin.
3. Create and publish a new Page called "Forum" in the "Pages" administrative tab.
   This page will serve as a place-holder for your menu and its contents will be displayed if you ever disable or uninstall the forum plugin.
   Ideal for an "in maintenance" page.

Your Forum plugin should now be ready for use.

Notes

• Please be aware that this is an ALPA / DEVELOPMENT release of this plugin.
  It is not ready for production use and you may encounter serious bugs when during its use.
• You will have to change "$this->" to "Page::" in your layouts.
• This release of the Forum plugin is hardcoded to use the Simple layout. You can change it in ForumController.php if you know what you're doing.
• Some development testing data is currently still being added to the Forum in the enable.php file. You can comment those INSERTs out if you want.
• The Forum plugin does not provide any means to login to the forum. It uses Wolf's internal user management system. I recommend you try the core (see the item below) or a plugin like Andrew's "Registered Users" plugin to provide frontend login functionality.
• The Wolf CMS core also provides a basic form of frontend login functionality. To use it, follow these steps:
  
  1. Create a new Page called "login" underneath the "Forum" page you created earlier.
  2. Set its status to "Hidden", its Login setting to "required" and check the Protected checkbox.
  3. Make sure its Filter option is set to "-- none --" and add the following content to the body:
     <?php redirect(BASE_URL.'forum.html'); ?>
  4. Save the page and provide a link to it from somewhere on your homepage.
• The "settings" page does not actually work yet and should be considered an indicative preview.
• No detailed documentation is provided yet.