DiscussionForumAddOn Development

I posted a new version of the DiscussionForumAddOn. This release incorporates many ideas of PeterThoeny. Nevertheless there are some ideas and problems open from the Plugins.DiscussionForum and Sandbox.DiscussionForum topic which are aggregated here.

-- AndreUlrich - 07 Jun 2003

Enhancement Ideas

• The archive page could be enhanced to accept a category URL parameter which can be used to show all articles of just one category.

• Direct save: Demo in Sandbox.DiscussionForum implemented this feature now. has to put in the package when CairoRelease is ready.

Problems

There is a rendering problem with the rounded edges on Netscape

• Is this problem still existent?

Better to use XHTML markup

• Some code left which is not conform with XHTML?

Shorten articletext

Long articles should be shorten in the DiscussionForumOverview. How to express this in a regex-statement?

• shows the whole articletext: $pattern(^.*?TEXTSTART -->(.*?)<hr.*)
  • shows the first 6 lines: $pattern(^.*?TEXTSTART -->(([^\n]*\n){1,6}).*\n<hr.*)

Number of comments can´t be calculated

• PTh: Use the topic revision number. Cut off the "1." part with the SpreadSheetPlugin -- PeterThoeny - 03 May 2003
  • Ok, this is a feasible solution but the count gets confused if someone update the topic manually.

Search has no "offset" parameter to shorten the archive-view

• PTh: Use the "order" and "limit" parameters -- PeterThoeny - 03 May 2003
  • It is rather necessary to cut of entries of the searchresult. This would also be useful for other topics like WebChanges. You would be able to display the next 20 results till example.

Further Comments

Cause of the use of the URLPARAM function an actual release of TWiki is necessary to deploy the DiscussionForumAddOn (See ExpandUrlParamForNewTopics)

---

I installed this at http://testwiki.mrjc.com/twiki/bin/view/DiscussionForumTest/DiscussionForumOverview.

I was surprised to see that the Comment plugin stage is still explicit. Obviously that makes it unusable - is this supposed to be demoware or has it been deployed anywhere yet?

-- MartinCleaver - 26 Sep 2003

This is due to the current implementation of the save cgi in TWiki. If the save cgi would accept a template and expand the URLPARAM variables it can be done without the edit-mode. This direct-save feature could also be used in other places like the change-parent function in more, which forces you to go through the whole edit process.

-- AndreUlrich - 26 Sep 2003

A direct-save feature would be very useful for end-users ie for KM applications !

-- BenoitFauvel - 05 Oct 2003

I filled in a request for direct-save option, to make the DiscussionForumAddOn finaly usable: SaveContentWithoutEdit

-- AndreUlrich - 13 Oct 2003

Is this AddOn still maintained by Andre? If not I have no problem taking this over. I have brought it into our Twiki site and have made a few changes and some updating (like, the ability to work with the new CommentPlugin).

-- SteveRJones - 14 May 2004

Ok, I've updated the templates and the DiscussionForumAddOn description page. I HAVE NOT tested this with the absolute latest version of Crawford's CommentPlugin, but I have indicated which version it works with. I did try a later version where the Comment templates were brought into the hosting web itself (and out of /templates )but ran into some very strange weirdnesses.

-- SteveRJones - 06 Jul 2004

Thanks Steve for jumping in, good to see that the idea gets developed further. I have changed the demo using the new direct-save feature comes with SaveContentWithoutEdit. When CairoRelease is ready this can finally go in

Just saw that DiscussionForumTemplate gets a lot of additional HTML-Code, which makes the edit of an articel in the WikiWay very hard. is it possible to switch back to Wiki-Code or is there a reason for this?

-- AndreUlrich - 31 Jul 2004

Has this been updated since the release of Codev.TWiki20040901 ?

Thanks.

-- MartinCleaver - 15 Sep 2004

• it still doesn't do direct save, and it leaves a mess in the topic.
• I made a comment, and going back now it says commenting is locked out by me, why?
• because of that HTML stuff in the topic, to be usable we'd have to disable the edit button
• and it packs the content inside >this< which will break a leading wikiword

My conclusion is that this is not ready for use. Comments?

-- MartinCleaver - 16 Sep 2004

And it says "new discussion forum" on the overview - shouldn't this be "new discussion"?

-- MartinCleaver - 16 Sep 2004

Well, this Add On is basically a "WYSIWYG". It works within the parameters defined on the addon page. I am in the process of migrating to 01Sep2004 and was going to try moving it into that environment.

Please keep in mind that this was an addon that basically was not kept uptodate and I took it on to see if I could make it work. Actually, given that the addon isn't a plugin I thought the approach was rather elegant if not simple - there is no fancy Perl code just the use of simple twiki features that I had to slog through to decipher.

It does not work with Crawford's latest CommentPlugin (but I note that). I need to check out what Andre did - I don't get email notices anymore of changed content on twiki.org!

-- SteveRJones - 05 Nov 2004

I added a SHORTDESCRIPTION to the "Add-On Info" section so that this add-on is represented properly in the AddOnPackage topic and query topics. Please feel free to take this into the next release.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Oct 2006

Is it yet safe to use the 03 Dec 2006 build of CommentPlugin with the DiscussionForumAddOn? I want to get a forum working on my TWiki implementation.

-- RonCostin - 08 Dec 2006

I do not think the spec of the CommentPlugin changed, it should work with this add-on.

-- PeterThoeny - 08 Dec 2006

I am having problems with the operation of this add on. I am running it in my Sandbox web using natskin. When I attempt to save changes to any DiscussionForum topic such as DiscussionForumCategoryOptions, I receive the following error: "Error saving topic During save of DiscussionForumCategoryOptions an error was found by the version control system." The associated URL for the error page makes me think this is perhaps a permission problem: https://[wikiURL]/[OurWiki]/bin/oops/Sandbox/DiscussionForumCategoryOptions?template=oopsattention;def=save_error;param1=RCS:%20failed%20to%20create%20file%20/Volumes/Storage/PerlScripts/SEATwiki/data/Sandbox/DiscussionForumCategoryOptions.txt:%20Permission%20denied

We are running the Dakar release of Twiki on Apache.

-- RonCostin - 12 Dec 2006

Make sure that all data and pub files from the add-on are owned by the Apache cgi-user (nobody, www-run or the like.)

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Dec 2006

Thanks, Peter. That resolved that issue. Here's the new issue: When new topic creation cycles to the Edit dialog and I click "Done" (we're running natskin/natedit,) I get the following error: "Undefined subroutine &TWiki::Store::_readTemplateFile called". The same thing happens when I click "Comments" for a topic in DiscussionForum Overview, or when I click the "Forum Template" link at the top of the same page.

-- RonCostin - 12 Dec 2006

Sorry for all of the traffic on this. I found that the "_readTemplateFile called" error was being caused by the 3.00 version of CommentPlugin cited on DiscussionForumAddOn. I just upgraded to the Dec 10 2006 release, and it appears to be working fine.

-- RonCostin - 12 Dec 2006

It's really not clear how one goes about creating a new topic without the create>edit>save cycle described in SaveContentWithoutEdit. However, from reading that page, it doesn't appear that a add-on or plugin was ever created to actually do the "direct" save. How is this function implemented? I see that it exists in a demo.

• This can be done with CommentPlugin. See the new CommentPluginExamples page in the zipped download. -- ArthurClemens - 23 Dec 2006

-- RonCostin - 12 Dec 2006

Rounded edge problem exists with Firefox 2.x and IE7, Opera 9.10. For next version, would like to see posts threaded by responses with the ability to respond to a specific post, instead of adding a comment to the forum topic. Still a big improvement over just using the comments plugin.

-- JasonRobinson - 22 Dec 2006

Somewhat similar in approach to a discussion form is BlogAddOn that I've created.

-- ArthurClemens - 23 Dec 2006

@ArthurClements : I have implemented the new version of CommentPlugin, but I'm not sure how to affect the behavior of new topic creation in DiscussionForum so as to skip the Edit interface step, and just directly save the new topic from the "New Discussion Forum" interface.

-- RonCostin - 25 Jan 2007

I am running DiscussionForum with NatSkin, and I am finding that because the NatSkin sidebar is especially wide, the Add Comment button on a DiscussionForum topic is pushed off the right side of the screen. Where do I change the width of the Comment text box in this context? I have looked closely at the CommentPlugin docs, but the default template parameters are tough to locate.

-- RonCostin - 25 Jan 2007

A work around might be to reduce the size of NatSkin side bar by editing BaseStyle.css or overriding the base style in your MyStyleStyle.css.

Replace that:

.natSideBar, .natTopRight {
  width:280px;
  min-width:280px;
  max-width:280px;
}

With:

.natSideBar, .natTopRight {
  width:20%;
  min-width:100px;
  max-width:280px;
}

NatSkin CSS are attached to your NatSkin topic.

-- StephaneLenclud - 28 Jan 2007

RonCostin, the (enhanced) documentation of CommentPlugin has an example. See for example CommentPluginExamples on the Bugs platform.

-- ArthurClemens - 28 Jan 2007

Add the following to your WebCss

.natMain a, natMain a:link { text-decoration: underline; }

.natMain { color: #222; }

form textarea{ width: 440px; }

-- ThiemeHennis - 08 Feb 2008

Hi I have a problem using voteplugin, when I try to use stars I get this error message. Can't locate TWikipath in @INC (@INC contains: c:\PROGRA~1\TWiki >> \twiki\lib . C:path C:path c:\PROGRA~1\TWiki\twiki\libpath c: >> \PROGRA~1\TWiki\twiki\libpath-x86-multi-thread c:\PROGRA~1\TWiki >> \twiki\libpath c:\PROGRA~1\TWiki\twiki\libpath) someboddy can help me? thanks

-- EduardFrades - 12 Mar 2009

Please ask support questions in the Support web.

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Mar 2009