To see how the Board looks like, simply use it here ;)

1. Description

The forum application is a full featured bulleting board and community forum. Forums can be grouped together in hierarchical categories with granular permissions for each of these. This allows users to create internal forums for only a selected number of people along side public forums as well as announcement forums where only privileged users can create new threads or posts.

As an example of the extensibility of the forum there are two simple yet powerful applications:

• LinkList: A very simple application which allows users to manage a list of links to websites and write comments. The forum templates and forms are customized to provide an input field for the website URL and show a thumbnail of the website.
• Blog: This application provides a new view to better display the latest threads of a forum as news entries and a new url configuration to have a slug as identifier instead of an ID.

2. Features

2.1. Extensibility

The forum application can be easily extended using "Category Types"

2.2. Misc

• Hierarchical Categories to separate threads
• Create Threads with Polls
• Displaying 'New Posts' icons beside threads / categories which contain new posts if user is logged in.
• Calculating the 'heat' of threads ('Hot threads') - see Board/Heat
• Previewing of posts.
• Quoting of previous posts
• Editing of your own posts
• Wiki links (CamelCase as well as [ ] enclosed links.)
• Support for Sitemaps (http://www.sitemaps.org) - For an example see http://sct.sphene.net/sitemap.xml
• Allow users to upload attachments to their posts.

2.3. Rendering of posts

• Use UBB Code and smileys in posts (powered by an implementation borrowed from Zyons where it was contributed by Luke Plant - thanks to them.. and google for finding it ;)
• Optionally allow markdown as markup language for forum posts. see SPH SETTINGS
  • Use custom markup languages by simply defining your own classes (also see SPH SETTINGS)

2.4. Administration Features

• Locking of threads (No replies to the thread are allowed any more)
• Sticky threads (These threads are always sorted first in the list of threads)
• Administrators can annotate or hide posts without editing them. See http://sct.sphene.net/board/thread/249/ for how it looks.
• Moving of threads to other categories

2.5. Security

• Anonymous posts with Captcha checking
• Different user privileges - Define who can create new threads, or post replies on a per-category basis. (Either everyone who is logged in or only admins)
• More granular permissions by using Roles.

3. Requirements

• Community Applications + all it's requirements

4. Development Documentation

• Board/TemplateTags - describes template tags provided by the board and how to use them.