Re: [libreoffice-website] choice of forum software

Hi Alexander, *,

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 8:16 PM, Alexander Werner
<alex@documentfoundation.org> wrote:
> Am 28.11.2011 um 18:52 schrieb Jonathan Aquilina:
> > On 11/28/11 6:48 PM, Florian Effenberger wrote:
> > > Jonathan Aquilina wrote on 2011-11-28 17:30:
> > > > What about the option of developing our own using the django python web
> > > > framework?
> > I would be willing to help if we can get a team together or of others that are interested in 
> > doing such a task.
> [there is djangoBB]
> Nevertheless, this will probably need more work than using another software, but if we can find 
> one or two people working on it would be nice in the long run.

I also would consider it a waste of efforts. Rather than developing
our own forum, the time is better spent fixing existing forums (when
they cannot be tweaked to our liking).
Where some work is needed is the extensions and templates repository,
but that is not using django, but is plone based. But if you like
python, you might give Andreas Mantke a hand with maintaining the
extensions/templates-repository.

The search in JForum seems fixed (works for me at least), but overall
the search options are a little limited compared to the advanced
search in phpBB (you can only select all forums, or one specific
forum, the UI doesn't allow to select a subset of the forums at once.
Not sure whether it is a pure UI limit or a functional limitation).
But as I never used the OOo-forums, I don't know how important it is
to search across multiple different forums. Probably more a sign of
loose moderation/topics not being moved to the appropriate forums)
phpBB has the administration overhead, at least on initial setup, but
I don't know how relevant it is, for JForum no additional
modules/hacks/whatever they are called are installed, so it is easy to
setup and upgrade.

So functionality wise JForum supports Karma and Avatars, on phpBB
those are not yet enabled/available. Question is whether we need
those.
Personally I like the "Author on the left, text on the right" layout
that the JForum theme uses better than the way it is laid out on
phpBB, but that's probably a matter of the css only.
What JForum also has is the concept of bookmarks - you can bookmark
forum posts and also flag bookmarks as public - nice to keep pointers
to FAQs/good answers I'd guess....
Having looked at JForum most of the time, I find the list of links at
the top also very convenient (esp. the recent topics one - in phpBB
the equivalent is "view active topics", but that's only accessible
from the index. - but that can be changed by the css/theme as well.

What is not easily changed by the theme is the "niceness" of the
links. phpBB uses query-parameters
http://forum-test.libreoffice.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4 , while on
JForum they are "nice" (although not human-gets-info-from-the-url
nice) http://forum-test.libreoffice.org:8080/jforum-2.3.2/posts/list/6.page

Unless someone reports bugs in JForum, I don't see a reason to look
for another alternative, i.e. JForum would be my "contender"/entry for
the forum-decision. (So far between phpBB and JForum).

While other forum-software has been mentioned, I didn't have the
impression that those mentions were "pleeeease use this one, it is
great", but more like "If you're still looking for alternatives, give
it a try, I was using it (as a user) at some point of time". But I
might have got things wrong.

Let's see in today's BOD call (16:00 UTC,
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetings#Next_Call )
whether we need more entries or whether we let people choose between
the two existing ones.

ciao
Christian

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