AA Forum

Simple forum app for Alliance Auth

• AA Forum
  • ⚠️ Before You Install This Module ⚠️
  • Overview
    • Features
    • Screenshots
      • Forum Index
      • Topic Overview / Board Index
      • Topic View
      • Start New Topic (ckEditor)
      • Admin View
  • Installation
    • Important: Please Make Sure You Meet All Preconditions Before You Proceed:
    • Step 1: Install the Package
    • Step 2: Configure Alliance Auth
      • Settings in /home/allianceserver/myauth/myauth/settings/local.py
      • Settings in /home/allianceserver/myauth/myauth/urls.py
    • Step 3: Configure Your Webserver
      • Apache
      • Nginx
    • Step 4: Finalizing the Installation
    • Step 5: Setting up Permissions
  • Changelog
  • Translation Status
  • Contributing

⚠️ Before You Install This Module ⚠️

This module needs quite some configuration done before working properly. You need to modify your Apache/Nginx configuration as well as the global URL config of Alliance Auth. So please only install if you know what you're doing/feel comfortable making these kinds of changes. For your own sanity, and mine :-)

Overview

Features

• Simple permission system. Only 2 permissions. ("has_access" and "can_manage")
• Simple administration, no maze to click through to get where you want to go.
• Categories and boards are sortable via drag and drop in the admin view.
• Mass creation of boards with a new category.
• Boards can be restricted to 1 or more groups, boards without restrictions are visible for everyone who has access to the forum.
• Announcement boards where only certain users can start topics.
• Child boards (1 Level), which inherit their access restrictions from their parent.
• CKEditor with image upload.
• Unread topics counter as a number on the "Forum" link in the left navigation.
• Optional notifications about new topics in a board via Discord webhooks.
• Forum profile for each user.
• Personal Messages.
  • Optional Discord PM for new personal messages.
    This feature is disabled by default, can be enabled by each user in their forum profile. Needs one of the following applications installed:
    • discordproxy
    • AA-Discordbot

Screenshots

Forum Index

Topic Overview / Board Index

Topic View

Start New Topic (ckEditor)

Admin View

Installation

Important: Please Make Sure You Meet All Preconditions Before You Proceed:

• AA Forum is a plugin for Alliance Auth. If you don't have Alliance Auth running already, please install it first before proceeding. (see the official AA installation guide for details)
• AA Forum needs a couple of changes made to your Webserver and Alliance Auth configuration. So make sure you know how to do so. The steps needed will be described in this document, but you need to understand what will be changed.

Step 1: Install the Package

Make sure you're in the virtual environment (venv) of your Alliance Auth installation Then install the latest release directly from PyPi.

pip install aa-forum

Step 2: Configure Alliance Auth

Settings in /home/allianceserver/myauth/myauth/settings/local.py

This is fairly simple, configure your AA settings (local.py) as follows:

# AA Forum
INSTALLED_APPS += [
    "ckeditor",
    "ckeditor_uploader",
    "django_ckeditor_youtube_plugin",
    "aa_forum",  # https://github.com/ppfeufer/aa-forum
]

if "ckeditor" in INSTALLED_APPS:
    # ckEditor
    import ckeditor.configs

    MEDIA_URL = "/media/"
    MEDIA_ROOT = "/var/www/myauth/media/"

    X_FRAME_OPTIONS = "SAMEORIGIN"

    CKEDITOR_UPLOAD_PATH = "uploads/"
    CKEDITOR_RESTRICT_BY_USER = True
    CKEDITOR_ALLOW_NONIMAGE_FILES = False

    # Editor configuration
    #
    # If you already have this from another app, like `aa-bulletin-board`, you don't
    # need to define this again, just add it to the `CKEDITOR_CONFIGS` dict, see below
    #
    # You can extend and change this to your needs
    # Some of the options are commented out, feel free to play around with them
    ckeditor_default_config = {
        "width": "100%",
        "height": "45vh",
        "youtube_responsive": True,
        "youtube_privacy": True,
        "youtube_related": False,
        "youtube_width": 1920,
        "youtube_height": 1080,
        "extraPlugins": ",".join(
            [
                "uploadimage",
                # "div",
                "autolink",
                # "autoembed",
                # "embedsemantic",
                "clipboard",
                "elementspath",
                # "codesnippet",
                "youtube",
            ]
        ),
        "toolbar": [
            {
                "name": "styles",
                "items": [
                    "Styles",
                    "Format",
                    # "Font",
                    # "FontSize",
                ],
            },
            {
                "name": "basicstyles",
                "items": [
                    "Bold",
                    "Italic",
                    "Underline",
                    "Strike",
                    # "Subscript",
                    # "Superscript",
                    # "-",
                    # "RemoveFormat",
                ],
            },
            {
                "name": "clipboard",
                "items": [
                    # "Cut",
                    # "Copy",
                    # "Paste",
                    # "PasteText",
                    # "PasteFromWord",
                    # "-",
                    "Undo",
                    "Redo",
                ],
            },
            {
                "name": "links",
                "items": [
                    "Link",
                    "Unlink",
                    "Anchor",
                ],
            },
            {
                "name": "insert",
                "items": [
                    "Image",
                    "Youtube",
                    "Table",
                    "HorizontalRule",
                    "Smiley",
                    "SpecialChar",
                    # "PageBreak",
                    # "Iframe",
                ],
            },
            {
                "name": "colors",
                "items": [
                    "TextColor",
                    "BGColor",
                ],
            },
            {
                "name": "document",
                "items": [
                    # "Source",
                    # "-",
                    # "Save",
                    # "NewPage",
                    # "Preview",
                    # "Print",
                    # "-",
                    # "Templates",
                ],
            },
        ],
    }

    # Add the external YouTube plugin
    aa_forum__external_plugin_resources = [
        (
            "youtube",
            "/static/ckeditor/ckeditor/plugins/youtube/",
            "plugin.min.js",
        )
    ]

    # Put it all together
    CKEDITOR_CONFIGS = {
        "default": ckeditor.configs.DEFAULT_CONFIG,
        "aa_forum": ckeditor_default_config,
    }

    CKEDITOR_CONFIGS["aa_forum"][
        "external_plugin_resources"
    ] = aa_forum__external_plugin_resources

Settings in /home/allianceserver/myauth/myauth/urls.py

Now let's move on to editing the global URL configuration of Alliance Auth. To do so, you need to open /home/allianceserver/myauth/myauth/urls.py and change the following block right before the handler definitions:

# URL configuration for cKeditor
from django.apps import apps

if apps.is_installed("ckeditor"):
    # Django
    from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
    from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache

    # ckEditor
    from ckeditor_uploader import views as ckeditor_views

    urlpatterns = [
        re_path(
            r"^upload/", login_required(ckeditor_views.upload), name="ckeditor_upload"
        ),
        re_path(
            r"^browse/",
            never_cache(login_required(ckeditor_views.browse)),
            name="ckeditor_browse",
        ),
    ] + urlpatterns

After this, your urls.py should look similar to this:

from django.urls import include, re_path

from allianceauth import urls

# Alliance auth urls
urlpatterns = [
    re_path(r"", include(urls)),
]

# URL configuration for cKeditor
from django.apps import apps

if apps.is_installed("ckeditor"):
    # Django
    from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
    from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache

    # ckEditor
    from ckeditor_uploader import views as ckeditor_views

    urlpatterns = [
        re_path(
            r"^upload/", login_required(ckeditor_views.upload), name="ckeditor_upload"
        ),
        re_path(
            r"^browse/",
            never_cache(login_required(ckeditor_views.browse)),
            name="ckeditor_browse",
        ),
    ] + urlpatterns

handler500 = "allianceauth.views.Generic500Redirect"
handler404 = "allianceauth.views.Generic404Redirect"
handler403 = "allianceauth.views.Generic403Redirect"
handler400 = "allianceauth.views.Generic400Redirect"

Step 3: Configure Your Webserver

Your webserver needs to know from where to serve the uploaded images, of course, so we have to tell it.

Apache

In your vhost configuration, you have a line ProxyPassMatch ^/static !, which tells the server where to find all the static files. We're adding a similar line for the media, right below that one.

Add the following right below the static proxy match:

ProxyPassMatch ^/media !

Now we also need to let the server know where to find the media directory we just configured the proxy for. To do so, add a new Alias to your configuration. This can be done right below the already existing Alias for /static:

Alias "/media" "/var/www/myauth/media/"

At last, a "Directory" rule is needed as well. Add the following code below the already existing Directory rule for the static files:

<Directory "/var/www/myauth/media/">
    Require all granted
</Directory>

So the whole block should now look like this:

ProxyPassMatch ^/static !
ProxyPassMatch ^/media !  # *** NEW proxy rule
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8000/
ProxyPreserveHost On

Alias "/static" "/var/www/myauth/static/"
Alias "/media" "/var/www/myauth/media/"

<Directory "/var/www/myauth/static/">
    Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory "/var/www/myauth/media/">
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Restart your Apache webserver.

Nginx

In order to let Nginx know where to find the uploaded files, you need to add a new location rule to the configuration. Add the following right below the definition for your "static" location.

location /media {
    alias /var/www/myauth/media;
    autoindex off;
}

Restart your Nginx webserver.

Step 4: Finalizing the Installation

Run static files collection and migrations

python manage.py collectstatic
python manage.py migrate

Restart your supervisor services for Auth

Step 5: Setting up Permissions

Now it's time to set up access permissions for your new module. You can do so in your admin backend.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md

Translation Status

Do you want to help translate this app into your language or improve the existing translation? - Join our team of translators!

Contributing

Do you want to contribute to this project? That's cool!

Please make sure to read the Contribution Guidelines. (I promise, it's not much, just some basics)