Forum/Board extension for Plone

:ok_hand:

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@tkimnguyen Nice ! Awesome !

So ... should we include that into the docs or into training ?

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Thanks for awesome introducing! That should be definitly in the Docs.

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Probably both... I think what I wrote above should is a tutorial so belongs more in training, but in the main docs we should at least describe the basic functions and features of plone.app.discussion with a link to the tutorial.

Hi Petri,

thank a lot for the helpfull answer, I will give it a try.

We are talking about "Deauville meets Deauville", see the old pages deauville-meets-deauville.com and in addition
www.dmd-2017.de/en/dmd-2017 for the temporary website for the meeting in 2017 in Germany.

Peter

Hi tkimnguyen, hi all,

I'm very impressed. I will try to get it work and may come back with some other questions :slight_smile:

Peter

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Thanks @Peter-Trier - any feedback you have will help us improve the documentation even more than you already have just by asking the question!

Nice example, +1 for making a tutorial out of it.

But @Peter-Trier i would recommend you using a forum like this forum and integrate it into your website, where you need. This forum uses https://www.discourse.org/ and this is really powerful.
It depends a little on, what you need and how deep you need to integrate it into your website.
Discourse is more powerful, but it is a separate system to maintain and needs work to integrate it (users aso).

That's an idea we listed in the GSOC ideas post, but what does integration mean on the Plone side?

  • a common theme (very doable with Diazo)
  • a common login system (either a PAS plugin or Authomatic configured to use the same authentication system you configure Discourse to use)
  • anything else?

I guess I'll ask the obvious (to me) question: why not just spin up a $20 Discourse community on DigitalOcean? I mean, why would you use plone.app.discussion when the Plone community doesn't even use it? Additionally, I can't even tell if plone.app.discussion is even any good -- there's aboulutely nothing on that github page to tell a technically limited person like myself anything about the platform. I mean, there's not even a single screenshot -- I just clicked off that page about a second after I got there. Can anyone find another example of a forum software (or forum plugin) that gives zero visual representation of what it is?

That's pretty harsh...

We certainly do use it. And if you scroll up you'll see I filed issues to improve the documentation situation. An open source project relies on volunteers to improve everything.

We'd certainly welcome your help making a documentation pull request!

plone.app.discussion was never designed as a discussion board or forum. It's for commenting on individual pieces of content. And it is doing a really good job for exactly that purposes. You can misuse and bend all pieces of software in various way to provide a certain functionality with minimal effort and minimal budget. That's it what was shown here. Nobody really wants to sell you plone.app.discussion as fully-fledged forum solution like Discourse. Don't compare cats with dogs

-aj

Although I stopped playing with Plone (you can guess why), I am still interested in the platform and find myself checking in on this community every now and then. My interest is hard to quantify because I'm not naturally technically minded, but I have always been fascinated with software platforms that allow people to interact, whether they be a CMS, forum, commenting, chat, etc.

The only reason I responded to this thread is because I run a very small Discourse motorcycle forum mainly for close friends, and I thought I'd share my thoughts with @Peter-Trier since he is a fellow motorcyclist.

My post was laced with my own frustration. Looking back now, I can see how the tone of my post could be interpreted as harsh -- that was not my intention.

I didn't know I was making such a comparison. I dunno, maybe my technical ignorance is getting in the way, but I understood Peter's original request to be for a forum, not a commenting system. I did not mean rub you the wrong way. In fact, it was your Youtube video that resonated most with me and gave me a bit of hope that maybe Plone was changing.
###Warning: I am about to ramble my way off the rails!

[quote="tkimnguyen, post:18, topic:3619"]
We'd certainly welcome your help making a documentation pull request!
[/quote]I don't know what a "pull request" is. If it means technical how-to writing, then I doubt I could help since I don't understand the material. Oddly enough, a while back, before I committed to Discourse for my forum, I was testing other "modern" forum platforms (NodeBB, Flarum, etc.). As usual for someone like me, I ran into all sorts of problems trying to get it installed (whether locally or remote) in order to test the software.

Here's the thing: I wasn't alone.

Many others shared my frustrations, and 90% of the time it was the installation that caused the most problems for (potential) adopters, and was the single biggest reason why most people left. I was so excited after I finally got Flarum installed that I actually did write a how-to. I wrote it for "me" just in case I nuked my installation I would have a resource to go back to. I don't know if that is what you refer to as a pull request.

Look, I know I'm rambling here, and I apologise to Peter for taking his thread off track. But, the fact of the matter is 99% of you have no clue, or have completely forgotten, or don't care (and that's ok, too) what it's like to be "me" -- the end-user.

You ever hear of the following saying?

written by lawyers for lawyers

Well, it applies to many things in life. I'm going to assume the vision for Plone developers is to get it in the hands of more people.

Here's my suggestion for increasing the adoption rate of Plone

Find yourselves 20 volunteer "end-user" guinea pigs like myself and task them with installing Plone. I'm talking about 20 non-developer Regular Joes that maybe have their own Wordpress blog (or similar) or a Wix site, etc. Spend 2 days in a hotel conference room with them, but observing only -- no help given. Note where people are getting stuck. Where are they going for solutions? Has anyone managed to install Plone locally? Remotely? What are they Googling? Is it things like:

Ubuntu xxx library missing
What is chmod
chmod vs chown
start pagefile on system start
Apache directory not accessible
Mod re-write

Now, I understand the above list isn't specific to Plone. I only listed it to convey how important it is to make your software easy to install -- for the masses, not for yourselves. A one-click install of Plone on Digitalocean would've been a dream for me, and would eliminate 90% of your battles! It's also the single biggest reason why I chose Discourse to power my forum.

When a new user goes from a "I can't fix missing python dependencies" scenario to a "How do I resize my logo" scenario, which scenario do you think has a better chance of keeping him a Plone user?

Take this feedback as you will, and apologies in advance for the rant and thread derailment.

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Going to split off discussion of Plone adoption rates here: Improved adoption ideas

@ron_jeremy thx for your suggestions how to improve the situation.
Sometimes this helps more than a pull request.
BTW pullrequest just means, that you could fix docs or add some missing informations.
If you don't know how to do it, we can help you. Or if you have like a chapter you would contribute but don't know how to add, just ask and we can add it for you.
The complete Plone docs are free and everybody can improve and use it.

Regarding the Installation, i had also some trouble, when i was guiding some one who was not using Plone at all before, to install it on his Ubuntu server. As we usually have the needed system libs alsready, the installation is very easy, but he didn't have this, so we needed some manuell steps and they where not so easy for him to find.

This could be improved.
But also the installer is a lot better now. I you just run it with out any options, it will give you the needed hints for the libraries. But if you run it with options like i always do, you will not have this ;).

So I think it's not hard to improve here, because in general the installation is not that complex. I simple how to install page should do the job. And I mean a simple one. Just run it and configure a Nginx in front of it. I think we have some good docs there, but maybe we should guide the users better to it.

And your suggestions with the user testing, is a really good way to test it and improve.

Regarding the forum, as Andreas sad, plone.app.discussion is not a forum, but you can use it like it for smaller things. But Discourse is of course a lot better for a forum and has way more interesting features for a forum. So as always it depends on your needs.

Personally a would almost every time go with a external forum, instead of a add-on inside a CMS. Because the user and developer base of this tool is usually bigger than for an add-on. But if you need a really deep integration with less effort, using internal tools like plone.app.discussion is worth a try.

where is the complete tutorial, I would like to create a forum my english is bad I'm mexican

plone.app.discussion is not a forum/board solution. It is a commenting system for Plone core. There was an attempt to create a forum solution on top of it:

Though, unfortunately this is very far from being production ready.

using the ideas from @tkimnguyen we built a small dating app last summer https://anzeigen.gay.ch (probably NSFW) in a way that also not so tech affine people are able to use it.

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Sorry for pushing this older thread.

But I am curious to know how this integration into a Plone site you are talking about could be done?

Maybe you could give me one or even two hints which way to go @MrTango?

Integration of users into Plone would not be important in my case as this could be handled by the external tool.