Products.SilvaForum 0.3.1

Forum for Silva

What is it?

SilvaForum is an extension for Silva 2.x that provides a classic discussion forum environment. Site visitors to create topics (subjects or questions) and add comments to existing topics. SilvaForum can be integrated with OpenID authentication and a CAPTCHA to prevent spambots from attempting to post.

Using SilvaForum

Visit the SMI (Silva Management Interface) to create a ‘Silva Forum’ object: this will serve as the root of the forum. The public views of the Forum allow (registered) clients to add topics (subjects) to the forum, and comments (messages) to the topics. The topics and comments are accessible from the SMI for editing and moderation purposes.

Access

Forums can be either exposed to the public, with authentication on the forms, or they can only be viewed by authorized users.

Probably the forum is already viewable by the public. If not, go to the access tab of the forum in the SMI and from the ‘public view access restrictions’ choose the setting ‘Anonymous’ and click ‘set restrictions’. This will allow the public to see and navigate the forum, however if any form input is submitted the user will be prompted for their login.

If the forum should only be viewed by authorized individuals, go to the access tab in the SMI and from the ‘public view access restrictions’, choose the setting ‘Authorized’, and click ‘set restrictions’. This only allows authorized users to access and view the forum and users will be prompted for login when entering the forum.

Logging out with Internet Explorer

Users using Internet Explorer have to explicitly logout with an unknown username and password, otherwise, IE will keep the current user logged in.

Styling Silva Forum

Silva Forum looks much better if you reference the included stylesheet.

Credits

Many thanks to Bas Leeflang and the Bijvoet Center http://www.bijvoet-center.nl/ for the assignment to build the forum.

Thank you Mark James of http://www.famfamfam.com/ for the great icons, which we used in the forum views!

Questions, remarks, etc.

If you have questions, remarks, bug reports or fixes, please send an email to [e-mail] or [e-mail].

History

SilvaForum 0.3.1

• Fix documentation format to ReST.

SilvaForum 0.3

• Re-wrote dtformat.py

• Added i18n support

• Removed SilvaTestCase.py.

SilvaForum 0.2-beta1

• Added condition on forum table to not display when empty.

• Adjusted presentation code so the forum works with Silva Layout.

• Refactored pagination code so defines are grouped.

SilvaForum 0.1-beta-2

• Changed regex in format_link to not include parenthesis, or periods.

• Removed the priority (was -4) in light of the doc/priority_settings.txt recommendations.

• The Include Comments code source includes icons for comments, these could be added to the forum view.

• Changes to make near-complete customization of the Include Comments code source possible with css.

• Move all the include checking in view_topic.pt into one define.

• Add id and topic_url to the comment object for constructing more sensible permalinks, going to the topic with an anchor that’s the comment id.

• Add permalink to “[user] posted”; this links to the comment in the topic with an anchor, not to the comment object (which is not very useful because there’s no context).

• Add a parameter field to the SMI to add a topic, which by default is the document title.

• Put in javascript toggle button for a comment form.

• Checked in Marc Petitmermet’s code source to the SilvaForum-CodeSource branch and added it to Silva Forum code. Added a view_include.pt, and include.css to handle the styles of a Silva Document with comments. Added to the FiveViewable class a switch to check for an ‘include’ parameter that gets the code source template.

• Fixed text formatting to include links, moved replace_links call from the view_topic.pt to the format_text method in view.py.

• Put replace_links method in the view.py for searching and replacing links in text area of comments. Also made tests for the method.

• Put back subject field check in view.py. Somehow it got cut in recent changes.

• Changed the topic and comment addable priority to 4.

• Changed the configure.zcml priority setting for Silva Forum to 4, to send it to the bottom of the addables list in the SMI select pulldown.

• Fixed the _generate_id method which would return ‘already used id’ with id’s ending in ‘___2’.

• Removed old security code triggered with the Ajax version of the forum.

• Fixed the pagination links to not can the add messages. Tweaked the the pagination code to be more efficient.

• Put in jump for the preview form on a comment. Now when previewing the comment will jump to the last page, the same page as where it is added.

• forum.css changes, added emoticon preview support to view_forum.pt, view_comment.pt subject fields.

• Ah, after reverting to static forms, unicode issue persists. Found the error on the preview hidden inputs, and re-wrote those to support unicode.

• Reverted to static form in view_topic.pt view.

• Reverted to static form in view_forum.pt view.

• Reversed order of topics newest to oldest. Added jump functionality. Found IE issue with Ajax forms.

• Pagination right/leftdouble.gif are not included in Silva 2.0, so put them into the www/ of SilvaForum.

• Took out all required switches from edit comment view.

• Unicode problem with textareas in view_topic.pt. Did ugly hack doing the unicoding in the tal expression.

• Took out required subject in the edit comment view by switching the required tag in form.form to 0.

• Made datetimes smaller.

• Removed emoticons directory again, only this time from svn.

• Finished Adding alt tag text to emoticons.

• Changed Silva Forum Thread to Silva Forum Topic and refactored code to use topic rather than thread.

• Put jump to last and first page pagination in the view_forum.pt

• Changed the topic functionality to only take topics. Opted to take out messages because they can’t be edited in the SMI without some considerable changes.

• Configured the view_forum.pt and view_topic.pt to get emoticons added in the subject field.

• Added support for emoticons.

• Added nice date/time formatting.

• Several layout fixes.

• Small code fixes and cleanups (see individual checkin messages for API changes).

• Added preview button functionality.

• Added javascript to hide the form, however this isn’t implemented yet.

• Added Several layout styles.

• Added pagination, and sorted list orders newest to oldest.

• Workout out a solution to authoring issue in the SMI.