Forum add-on for Plone 5.1

Plone Support Add-on Development
21

I'm sorry, but we're in the middle of presidential elections over here and I'm busy analising logs and fighting DDoS attacks on some of our sites :frowning:

on the other side, we have not finished the project I mentioned before and we lack resources to dedicate to this at the moment.

you'll have to wait or look for help from others.

22

If you really need it and you can find some budget for it you always have the option of asking a provider for development time. plone.com/providers

23

It would have to be out of my own pocket. I could only budget about $200/mo, but if someone was productive at a few hours per month and was willing, I would set aside the funds. I know that is peanuts for most developers, but its all I can afford for these non-revenue communities. I'm already stretched so thin just keeping the hosting and related services limping along.

24

Huh, I was about to suggest Alteroo but they're not in the providers list... @pigeonflight why is that? :smiley: They'd be lower cost than US-based folks. Or you could ask @rodfersou...

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25

@merpdotcom,
If there are 5 or 6 others interested in a monthly commitment this could work.

My immediate thought.

  • Identify persons/companies interested in seeing a minimum viable product (MVP) implemented
  • Have the group commit to a monthly amount for the project (this would affect the amount of time that can be committed per month towards the project)
  • Review the user stories and reduce the scope to the absolute minimum viable product (MVP)

Output:

  • The MVP
  • A monthly tutorial documenting the stages and process of building the MVP
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26

Crazy idea:
There is a serverless forum platform. What if we implemented enough of a GraphQL api to make it compatible with Plone?

27

this is not what we're expecting; even as this seems pretty interesting, we need something that works with Plone with no external components. the original idea was to go with collective.ploneboard.

what about making your idea a GSoC project? migrating content from collective.ploneboard could be an extra.

28

I think collective.ploneboard was a GSoC project. I can't see why further work on it wouldn't be acceptable as another GSoC project.

29

Ok. Is there any established method to find people from other organizations that might be interested to join in supporting the effort? Is there a process or platform that is used to announce/propose such projects and inform people about the possibility to provide support?

30

There's a platform called https://crowdspire.org/ built by some Plone people. It could be used to run a campaign for the project.
Or use something like https://patreon.com or https://ko-fi.com/.

31

(I work for Wildcard, the company that made Crowdspire)

Save your money (especially if you’re a US person) and use Crowdspire, which takes 2% as a fee. Other crowdfunding services often takes a lot more of the donated money ... or use a PayPal account and set up your own donation button and share it manually or put it on a web site.

I used Crowdspire to fund Kyle Arthurs’ summer project to finish a Windows installer for Plone a bit over a year ago

32

Thanks for the suggestion about crowspire, I'll check into that.
Here is the big question, are any others out there, besides just us, that want back some kind of forum functions with an integrated Plone experience?
If there are any others, are there any that are interested enough to be willing to help pitch in?
Or do I just need to start saving up personally? (or just (sadly) give up on hoping anymore for Plone with the sites that need integrated fora?)
Would be great if any others interested in this functionality would post here to let me know if it is worth the time to set up such a campaign or not.
Thanks!

33

I think there is little need for a discussion forum in decent projects. In particular it will be hard to find enough sponsor for getting a reasonable amount of money for funding such a bigger project for now and for the future.

34

I think it would be useful and I’d like to help but realistically I don’t have much dev time to donate.

There are some small organizations I help who could use something more persistent and better organized than (ugh) Slack. I like Discourse (this forum) but it’s overkill to set up a separate instance plus website plus mailing list. One Plone site that does things would be perfect (as in “good enough”).

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35

I used the internal discussion system attached to simple Page-derivated FTIs with Discussion enabled by default (named Thread) at one of my customers for a very simple Forum. Ok, this is for registered Customers only (Extranet) but works very good and was just one hour configuration.

36

We're fine with only registered users being able to post. Do you have a posting anywhere or examples posted anywhere to see if it would work on our end? Thanks!

37

I think Jens uses what I described in Forum/Board extension for Plone basically Plone pages or news items or custom content types with Plone built in commenting enabled

38

The first version of collective.ploneboard was supposed to be nothing more than that. A "topic" content type with discussion enabled. I think it wouldn't be much effort to build something basic like this. If we have a sponsor for half a day or day of dev work I guess we could do it...I am happy to help if someone wants to tackle this...

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39

Found one exception: https://github.com/collective/collective.ploneboard/issues/4

And did a PR to fix: https://github.com/collective/collective.ploneboard/pull/5/files

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40

Thank you! I pushed my first version of collective.ploneboard that I created before GSOC 2014 to master. I guess this is a decent starting point with the base functionality of a board in place. I am happy to make a release if people find it useful...

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