Nicer forum templates

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Author	Message
Paul Borgermans	Wednesday 23 April 2003 11:39:20 am To all who want "nicer" forums, I'm adapting a set of templates and the classes for forums and forum messages (and users and user groups) and would like some input on what makes forums more useful. Current planned features are: 1) message view: possibilities for thread view of child messages with depth indication (somewhat like the 2.2.x series). The display of message bodies can be switched on/off in the template 2) icons for usergroups and possibly individual users for identifying the poster of messages better (this seems to be implemented here too, only ez crew for now) 3) forum view: indication of number of posts on a topic (like implemented on the forums here) 4) forum view: indicator for recent activity on a certain topic 5) forum view: latest child message for a topic (like implemented on the forums here) 6) forum view: "sticky" messages which are placed first on the topic list with an icon hinting at their status The above features are inspired by my limited experience with other forum incarnations. Do you have other suggestions, possibly with an url pointing to an example in other products? Any design hints (I'm not a designer)? When finished, I'll post the templates, icons etc with instructions in the contributions section. Paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans
Niklas Gunnäs	Thursday 24 April 2003 9:12:25 am I have the following suggestions - Counter for how many post a user have made. - User titels like newbie, support, developer..... - two diffrent "stinky" topics - announcement and sticky - Link to users homepage, icq, e-mail .... More suggestions (more or less outside the forum section) - I woulde like to have a system where user get 1 points for posting in forum and lets say 5 points for submiting articles, 2 point for bug report and so on. - User profile with information about joined, forum posting, articles, last active, contributions, his/her to do list, bugreport, bugfix and much more... /Niklas
Gabriel Ambuehl	Thursday 24 April 2003 9:16:23 am - Slashdot like Nested threads. - Two frame based look were the top frame displays the threads and the bottom frame displays the message upon clicking on one (just like normal newsreaders do it). I've always found that to be the most intuitive interface to a forum and it probably needs the smallest amount of traffic, too. Since I assume frames could be a bit hard to integrate, iframes would be simple. They are deprecated but personally, I do think it's worth the usability. Another really cool feature (I have no idea how it was implemented tho) is Kuro5hin's dynamic display where only the next part gets fetched and integrated in an already existing tree. Visit http://triligon.org
Paul Forsyth	Thursday 24 April 2003 9:33:06 am Paul, We've just went live with our first try with forums using ez3. Have a look at: http://www.cctvimagebank.com/ We modelled it on the current ez forums but much more is definitely possible. Paul
Gabriel Ambuehl	Thursday 24 April 2003 9:58:01 am Your site is very responsive. What platform do you guys run it on? Visit http://triligon.org
Paul Borgermans	Thursday 24 April 2003 10:37:14 am >- Counter for how many post a user have made. Planned >- User titels like newbie, support, developer..... Planned: there will be some "category" names defined, as I now think using the user groups is not a wise idea (which group if a user belongs to more than one group for instance) >- two diffrent "stinky" topics - announcement and sticky Planned: sticky messages have their own class and an enum attribute for having different categories of sticky things >- Link to users homepage, icq, e-mail .... Not really planned yet in this little subproject, but it is part of another one ;-) > More suggestions (more or less outside the forum section) >- I woulde like to have a system where user get 1 points for posting in forum and lets say 5 points for submiting articles, 2 point for bug report and so on. That's easy to do with a fetch function and template operators, not planned though >- User profile with information about joined, forum posting, articles, last active, contributions, his/her to do list, bugreport, bugfix and much more... Do you know a quick way of cloning myself? :-) ------------------------ >- Slashdot like Nested threads. That's what I had in mind, but for now with template coded limits, not user defined (that's also for a "user preference system" where all these and other settings can be stored) >- Two frame based look were the top frame displays the threads and the bottom frame displays the message upon clicking on one (just like normal newsreaders do it). I've always found that to be the most intuitive interface to a forum and it probably needs the smallest amount of traffic, too. >Since I assume frames could be a bit hard to integrate, iframes would be simple. They are deprecated but personally, I do think it's worth the usability. Sorry, I adopted the no frames/iframes idea although you have a point here >Another really cool feature (I have no idea how it was implemented tho) is Kuro5hin's dynamic display where only the next part gets fetched and integrated in an already existing tree. Can't see what you mean. Can you elaborate? Paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans
Tony Wood	Thursday 24 April 2003 11:17:02 am For Paul:>>Cloning http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2936401.stm Looks like it may be be possible.... Now, maybe you could integrate yourself into some kind of clustering technology? :) Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood Vision with Technology Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development Power to the Editor! Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future
Paul Forsyth	Thursday 24 April 2003 12:18:22 pm gabriel, i was hoping tony would answer this one as he built those boxes ;) basically caching is used to good effect. paul
Paul Forsyth	Thursday 24 April 2003 12:27:04 pm Paul, We would like to see users play a bigger role in forums. With the cctv site we used a very simple user model with one editor and one anonymous user. The editor uses the workflow to approve any forum topics/replies before it hits the site. I was wondering if you are planning some php coding to make users more functional? For example, a count of a users posts could be done via a fetch but that would cost the server if the forums has many users and messages, whereas the best option would be to record something in the database. We would also need notification to make it all gel together, which i hope isn't too long away... Basically a lot of the user information is best stored with the user in the db. Paul
Paul Borgermans	Thursday 24 April 2003 12:48:39 pm First I will go for a "proof of concept", after this I will create the php snippets for increasing speed if necessary. But in priciple, when the template processing gets compiled into php and cached (hope it does for 3.1), you may as well stick to template code as speed should increase an order of magnitude. Until then, 2 Ghz dual cpu servers + php accelerator are the minimum for a heavy load ezp3 server. Thank you all for your comments and tips, now and in the future Regards Paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans
Niklas Gunnäs	Thursday 24 April 2003 2:06:48 pm Paul don´t do the clone thing it may be dangerous :-) Will love to help you with the design if I only can get some free time. /Niklas
Niklas Gunnäs	Friday 25 April 2003 3:48:06 am What I was looking for is connecting - User titels like newbie, support, developer..... and - I woulde like to have a system where user get 1 points for posting in forum and lets say 5 points for submiting articles, 2 point for bug report and so on. So if a user get < 100 points it will move him/her to next level. Like from newbie to prospect ;-). One idea is to give user more rights when the get to next level. More wishes is that there will be one type of titels what will change with higher points and one for staff that not change like support team, developer.... I like yabbse and phpbb idea with symbols for showing with level user have. One more thing. It would be great if last active topics always moves to top of topiclist. /Niklas
Gabriel Ambuehl	Friday 25 April 2003 5:14:22 am Paul, as to Kuro5hin dynamic threading (I know it works on IE 6 and Mozilla 1.3 cause that's what I got here ATM), I can't seem to be able to get a direct link but go to http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/24/02152/3927 and click on "Dynamic" or "Dynamic threaded" just above the first comment. Basically, you get a thread list with small buttons and if you click the button, exactly that post will be displayed while keeping the tree intact. In a way, it's like nested but you start out with a collapsed tree. But I must admit, I have no idea how it works. Visit http://triligon.org
Paul Borgermans	Friday 25 April 2003 5:35:34 am Ok now I see it. That's of course nice, I'll see how far this goes (DHTML is still a difficult issue if you want it to degrade nicely for olser browsers). It is straight forward (typical dhtml code). Paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans
Gabriel Ambuehl	Friday 25 April 2003 9:02:07 am Well I'd guess it should be possible to have different ways of rendering the data in one forum by having different templates? Some people love flat, BB style, other nested etc. I'd say let the users decide! Visit http://triligon.org
Jerry Jalava	Tuesday 10 June 2003 1:22:48 pm Has any1 got any templates ready for others to use also? I'm building a portal with eZ and right now I'm starting to build the forums... I would just like to get some ideas/hints/tutorials how to archive these kinds of things with templates... Edit: I would also like to what kind of class is needed to build for some additional features? Could someone make an example with some nice feature? (template code & class)... Regards, Jerry
Paul Borgermans	Wednesday 11 June 2003 2:25:17 am I have a slightly improved version: - sticky forum messages, requires a new class "sticky messages" - icons for users (from primary group), requires changing the user group class - thread view alla slashdot - use of wordtoimage and autolink - latest reply in forum message list (like here on ez.no) - uses its own forum.css style sheet (need to incorporate this in the pagelayout.tpl or override template for it). But I'm still not satisfied and planned next week to release a better version of it after other deadlines have passed. Sorry for posting this later than I initially wanted to. Paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans
Jerry Jalava	Friday 04 July 2003 7:55:36 am Hi Paul! I was just wondering when could other of us in community get to test this forum of yours... ;) I would really love to try it... Thanks, Jerry
Paul Borgermans	Friday 04 July 2003 11:27:58 am I added work-in-progress to the contributions. Included are some screen-shots too. Modify them as you wish --paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans