Requested features for JForum3

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Hi Rafael,

I'm currently investigating forum engines for a commercial project. I like a lot JForum2 (I'm using it for my personal forum) so I'm very interested about JForum3 development.

In our functional specifications we have a lot of required features I'm going to describe here, please tell me if you think theses features have a chance to be implemented in JForum3:

1) SSO authentification

There should be no problem with SSO, that's the easy required feature (I already managed JForum2 to work with CAS).

2) Custom notification mechanism

Do you plan a mechanism allowing custom notification? I guess that notification by email will implemented out of the box (like in JForum2), but it should be great to allow developpers to add extra notification systems. For example we'd like to implement notifications using XMPP (Jabber) to alert users about replies in their watched threads.

3) RESTful API

It should be great if JForum3 entities will be available via a RESTful API:
- CRUD for users
- CRUD for forums
- CRUD for categories
- CRUD for topics

4) Multi-instances support

That's definitively the trickiest feature. We need to allow users (or user groups) to have their own forums (one public and one private surely). But here we speak about thousands of forums (!!), so it involved a lot of things:
- creating forums on the fly (it's ok if there's CRUD for forums via the REST api)
- setting special permission for these forums (hmm maybe user groups and permissions should be available in the REST api too) and allowing administrators *by forum*
- setting special visibility for these forums (they need to be not displayed in the standard forum listing)

I'll be very glad to help you in the JForum3 development but before that I need to convince myself (and my company) that JForum3 is the right solution for us..

Thanks,

Vincent.


[originally posted on jforum.net by turman]

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You have interesting ideas, and I specially agree with yout about REST interfaces - that's one thing I always wanted. You can add them to Jira, to make sure we will remember all of them.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

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Oops sorry for the late reply, in fact we're now investigating other software but for sure I'll keep an eye on the JForum3 progress .
Anyway I'm going to create some issues in JIRA for these requests.

[originally posted on jforum.net by turman]

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Hmm your JIRA instance seems to have some troubles: An existing index lock was found.
[originally posted on jforum.net by turman]

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Rafael Steil wrote:You have interesting ideas, and I specially agree with yout about REST interfaces - that's one thing I always wanted. You can add them to Jira, to make sure we will remember all of them.

Rafael

Add another vote for REST support... REST in the loose sense. Having used REST many times, I don't see practical benefits of conforming to all of the strict interfacing standards. If the CRUD methods are kept very simple (the whole point) and documented, then it's both very easy to implement and very easy for everybody to use.
[originally posted on jforum.net by blaine]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I suggest getting rid of the anomalous "Anonymous Posts" permission setting. This setting is useless for all Groups except for groups currently assigned to user "Anonymous", and only lets you diverge post ability based upon whether the user is anonymous or not. If it were clearly documented that authenticated (i.e. non-Anonymous) users automatically get assigned to the Group with ID 1; and Anonymous users have exactly the Groups assigned to the "Anonymous" pseudo-user; then admins could easily assign default permissions to anonymous vs. authenticated users with all the fine-grained control of Groups. Us JForum users appreciate the power of Groups... so why wouldn't we want the ability to use groups to control the two most important subsets of forum users, anonymous vs. authenticated, instead of giving just one check-box for that purpose?

It would be nice if there were a setting to specify the default group(s) granted to new, named users, instead of magically setting it to whatever group has ID of "1". Would be great if a default install would set up 2 groups, Anonymous and Authenticated, instead of the group "General". It would then be very intuitive for new admins to set up the exact perms they want for authenticated vs. anonymous users; instead of giving them the single "Anonymous Posts" checkbox for the General group.
[originally posted on jforum.net by blaine]

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blaine, I understand your point, and it does make some sense. I'll thought about it, thanks for sharing.

turman, I'm indeed having problems with Jira and my VPS hosting account. I disabled it until I can find a nice fix.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

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Tag clouds!

When is JForum3 going to be out?
[originally posted on jforum.net by Cadillac]

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turman wrote:Oops sorry for the late reply, in fact we're now investigating other software but for sure I'll keep an eye on the JForum3 progress .
Anyway I'm going to create some issues in JIRA for these requests.

Just out of curiosity, which forum you eventually decided to?
[originally posted on jforum.net by huima]

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Drupal, not specially for its forum but for the whole stuff (it's a huge CMS and tons of modules/plugins).
[originally posted on jforum.net by turman]

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turman wrote:Drupal, not specially for its forum but for the whole stuff (it's a huge CMS and tons of modules/plugins).

Ah, that on the other hand has been teh reason why I haven't used Drupal .-D

Too much stuff that I don't need, as the features already implemented in an another application. But yeah, Drupal can be a good platform.
[originally posted on jforum.net by huima]