Earlier this week I released the Beta 2 version of the Forum module. As with the previous version, I expect there to be bugs. The module is definitely feature complete at this point, but we are fine tuning a few other things during this beta period in addition to tracking bugs.

We want to...

Change some of the css classes to make use of existing skin css classes via subclassing. Ability to render iconbar as a styled text link instead of icons. Correct any outstanding usability...

For those who have been following the project at all, the past seven months I have spent doing a major overhaul of the module. If you see some of my previous blogs I explain some changes around permissions, adding email templating, bringing a designer onto the team, and a few other things over this time period. In addition to these items, the major item I added was an email notification scheduled task. This allows all email sending to be pushed into a seperate thread and increases the performance of the module...

I have spent a bit of time working on some of the core items of the module. I started a vote to see what the community wanted and offered three choices:

Permissions Enhancement Email Notification Enhancement Skinning Enhancement While seeing the trend so far going towards email, I decided to look at what it would take to re-write permission control since I said the winning vote will not be in the next release. This was what seemed to be the most critical out of the options in my opinion. I realized...

The latest forum module version 3.20.06 is available for download. It is also included with the latest DotNetNuke x.3.1 source installs. This module has only been tested in Core versions 3.2.2, 4.0.3 and the x.3.1 lines. There was the 3.20.05 version which was available only with the 3.3/4.3 downloads, but we found a couple minor issues we wanted to fix immediately.

The user guide will not be published for this release, please see the previous doc as most of the functionality is the same. (Although there...

I have released the forum beta to the private testing members of the community. This is all project leads, Core Team members and of course the project team members. I also invited a few others who are members of other projects of DotNetNuke to get involved.  This is not a public beta as the module will be released within one week from Friday. Yes there is a solid deadline for this, unlike most project announcements involving release dates which are vague.

There is a pretty extensive list of fixes and...

Somehow despite my rather over filled plate of tasks, there has consistently been progress on the forum module in preperation for a release which I thought wasn't going to happen for another month or so from now. We are still comitted to making this happen and the issue is more pressing with the eventual closing of the ASP.NET forums. I just finished up my final round of edits for the Wrox book and the For Dummies book has been pushed out a little bit. I have been working on the Dummies book the past two weeks,...

In my last blog I expressed how I was in the middle of enhancements and wanted to release after the next core release. The release that follows the next core releases (3.3 & 4.1) will still be the 3.30 version of the forum module but I have decided to sneak on in. I don't want to hold this release off now as I realized I could easily hide partially finished enhancements and also wanted to offer one final upgrade to users not on the 3.3 or greater DotNetNuke platform. (and 4.1)

The next release has a few minor things we need to finish up to ensure it will operate smoothly on here, then we will dogfood it here. This will not include the user lookup replacement and private messaging will be pushed until the following release. This will also allow us to add some features to PM to make it more useable. For the 3.20.03 release you should look for bug fixes, moderation enhancements, moderator auditing, automated post delete response selection, global moderation, tree view replacing forum lookup, breadcrumb first level click navigates to single group view, more checks for XSS, Missing Content handler, authorized user attachment downloads (restriction), several fixes for search indexing, database item reconciliation (delete dead sprocs, mising dbo or objectqualifier in previous scripts, change other elements to prepare for 3.30, etc), additional area time/date culture handling, additional items localized, and moderator email notification 'opt-outs'.

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The last release of the forum module was 3.20.01 and it was released in December. This is the version being run here on DotNetNuke.com and it does have some bugs. There are some rather annoying bugs but almost all of them can be worked around. When we started developing the next version we were looking to only correct bugs. In correcting the bugs there were a few enhancements I deemed necessary for another release. Other enhancements I decided to curb until a later release.

Some of these enhancements...

Not too much besides the Steelers winning the Super Bowl!!

Now that I have seen the NFL season to its end and have most of my writing obligations completed for the Wrox DNN 4 book, I thought I should dive into the forum module again to fnish some things off.  One of the items I spent time on for the Wrox book was the Client API.  Jon has done a great job of offering up some documents around this as well as a module example and his webcontrols project too.  I spent some time taking all that in and still...

I didn't get to spend too much time with it today but did some minor testing and code updates on the Private Messaging and the Forum_Users table to support it.  I have slimmed down this table a bit by removing items no longer used and the two elements which actually pull from profile no longer needed to be in this table. (TimeZone, URL).  The additional columns added are simply bit columns thus making this a bit more trim. 

After word of this enhancement started spreading, I have been receiving lots of questions.  I will try to address a few of these in the following paragraph:

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Last night I checked in most of the code for the forum private messaging system.  This includes the control via the module, all the controls for the system itself, updates for the user profile and data changes around all of this were checked in this morning.  I still have to go back and handle deleting of it, integrate the buttons in posts UI (right now only available from the user's profile), tweak the UI just a tad and test test test!

There has been some other minor changes I checked in but none of them are fully completed yet.  I will chat about these as they are finished.

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Go Steelers!  Just had to get that out of the way. 

Along with some bug fixing going on and some changes that seemed essential I have also been working on the following:

Member Listing - Directory Private Messaging Global Moderators I have the pm system almost finished and the global moderators almost finished as well.  They need a bit more work, but mostly testing at this point.  I have added the member listing page, but would not consider it above 25% of the way done (considering the member...

If you keep up with this project at all, you should keep an eye on this thread: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/ForumsProjects/tabid/795/mid/2108/threadid/11681/scope/posts/Default.aspx

Gemini is also a good place to keep an eye on this project.

I have been posting what I we have fixed so far for the module since last release.  There is a pinned post in the Developing the Forums forum which has some of the fixes so you can apply yourself.  For those who are waiting for another release to address things, and there are very few, I cannot give a date but I can say there is progress each week and there are only a few items I know haven't been fixed yet:

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I spent a good half day (12 hours) on the forums on the first day of this year. I see that it is pretty solid and the items I have been working on are definately far from being show stoppers.  My goal of these changes is to not only get fixes in for whatever is broken, but to also enhance usability if the items are not too intrusive.  I am also trying to sort out the last part of themes because I feel we are going to determine a better way to handle this in the future but need to buy time now since the forum...

Check out the project page to download the latest document.  This is a 75 page document available here: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Default.aspx?tabid=823. 

Today Shaun gave a great explanation in his blog about daily builds to the community and the difficulties around that with this project.  As part of the Continious Integration team (which is basically myself, Scott Willhite and Bryan Andrews), I have a firm understanding of all the benefits of daily builds but...

My .NET article was published here: http://br.sys-con.com/read/163749.htm

It is about this project. 

I put in another hour on the forum user document today.  Its starting to look like this one is going to be about 65 pages total.  Lots of this content comes from screen shots though, but there is definately plenty of reading.  I am starting to worry that this is getting to big to retain the interest of anyone.  This should probably be considered a reference manual because it is so large and in depth.  If you are new to a module or even DNN this can really get you started with a module as a user and administrator. ...

I spent about two hours this evening trying to update the user documentation for the forum module.  I would say I am about 2/3's of the way completed.  When I wrote the last version, I didn't think updates would take this long but there were many changes for moderation and administration.  Since I don't see any drastic changes like this in the future, hopefully it will go much faster for the next version. 

If you haven't read the first version, you might as well wait another day or two for this one. ...

If you are using or following the project, you might be excited to here I just released a couple things.

First, I released a What's New module for the forum which is available as a seperate download from http://projects.apptheory.com, AppTheory's project portal.  Please note that this is not an official project or core release thus the reason it is not hosted on here.  If you need support or would like to provide feedback please use the forums on the AppTheory...

For the past two months or so I was unable to post a blog on this site.  This was a problem for myself and a few other team members but not all.  It actually was because we were running a pre-release version of this module on here.  Well, all that is fixed now.

As most of you know the forums were released.  At release, I knew of one existing bug and it was the popup in firefox.  So far, there hasn't been much pain aside from that. 

For those a bit out of the loop, its released.  I am going to post a new user document and a new theme as soon as I have the proper permissions on this site again.

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I appologize for my brief absence but I have good reasons.  I was sick for most of a week and then had to move.  I just now got internet back at home and almost all my DNN development is done at home in my freetime.

Anyways, the Forum release is looking awesome.  We have fixed the popup issues and have a new theme coming out which displays how the forums can be themed to look very different from the original standard themes.  This theme is named Simply Clean.  An example of it can be seen on www.crispy.us. ...

We have finished all the pages which are completely rendered from vb.net code and do not have a matching ascx.  It may not seem like much, but it takes about 8 hours each view to rewrite it to be elastic and look the same in Firefox, Safari, and IE.  These views are: Portal Search Results, Forum Search Results, Initial Forums Group View, Threads View, Posts View, Moderation Queue View.  If you do the math, that is rougly 50 hours of coding. 

What is left to do in the UI is the ascx's.  These are mostly...

Not too much beyond thinking has been going on this week so far.  There has been more progress on the UI changes and now it seems only the intial group view needs finished.  This has already been started and all the patterns are in place so this shouldn't take too long. 

With this out of the way, the thread read status will probably be next.  The paging bug fix is already in the works.  This leaves only the popup compatability in firefox along w/ some script problems w/ the popup not working on what appears to be windows 2003 servers only.  Still looking into this one and need some more information from Tam. 

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One of the things that after listening to outside feedback,  and internal team members, that needed work was the confusion with icons.  So, we have added a unlocked icon for unmoderated forums, added a locked icon for locked threads.  These also have corresponding gray for already have been read.  We are also workign on changing the popular thread icons to something a bit more of an indication, perhaps the original icons will all have duplicates but w/ a "!" on them or something. (also gray versions w/ this too).  We'll see as we are just tossing around what to do about this exactly.

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I spent a bit of time today with the forums.  I wanted to make sure the issues being checked in by team members were documented so I didn't have to track down every change for next release.  I am trying to keep the readme.txt current so aside from Gemini I know what has been done. 

So far:

- FOR-1913 - Changed setting key to ForumMailFormat instead of HTMLMailFormat

- FOR-1956 - Corrected problem when posts were deleted via moderation screen, they were not removed until leaving and returning...

The community and I have found several bugs which I have logged into Gemini.  I have to say that despite these bugs, this is still a very stable release.  I think perhaps that the user documentation helped avoid some of the common configuration errors, but who knows for sure. 

I've been trying to get the team going, chatting with the folks here and there but it is difficult w/ a team that spans the globe.  I have always stayed up later in the past and Tam and I could communicate this way, but getting...

Aside from some bug fixes and maybe changing attachments to use core file manager, I am really not certain what should go in the .05 release.  I do know that this one shouldn't be too far off from the last.  I want to get the few bugs out there fixed ASAP.  Oh yeah, cleaning up localization will be done also.

Some other ideas have been submitted to me, but they are not for this next release.  Oneof these ideas are a new way of moderation.  I have finally started seeing a post here and there about forum...

The forum usage seems to be pretty high so far based on what i am seeing in terms of forum activity.  It is nothing spectacular but we also haven't announced the release yet. 

I was going to let forums go for 2-3 months without another release but now i am considering a faster maintanence release.  I figure after releasing gallery i can start wrapping up another forums release while planning the next gallery.  I have found that point of one project is prime time to work on another. 

The next forums release will be just fixes.  I want to fix everything we have seen so far and work out any other minor findings by then.  There will be no major overhauling of the module in any way.  After reading some feedback from this blog, I plan on cleaning up localization a bit for the module.  I would say this and the moderation stuff are the only things that need some polishing.  (Not that everything else couldn't always use some love!)

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You know, you finally provide documentation that the community so desperately wants and people don't use it!  :) 

I honestly think some of this is because people are not aware of its existance.  Currently finding this blog page or the project pages at all is a bit of a secret task.  Its almost as if anyong finding these pages belongs to some sort of a secret club at this point. 

As for the modules development now.  A couple of the project team members have really stepped up and started getting...

Its been just over 24 hours and the release of the forum module and it seems to be going pretty well.  At a shot to hopefully aid the community in using the module, I released the first official user document for the project this morning.  The module and the document are available from the project's download page, located here: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Default.aspx?tabid=823. 

So far it seems there are only two concerns.  The first one is the solpart navigation. ...