Forum OpenACS Q&A: Setting up forums and attachments

I'm trying to test forum attachments on OpenACS 4.6.3b1 and PG, but I can't figure out how to set it up.

I've mounted Forums at /forums, File-Storage at /file-storage and Attachments automatically gets installed at /attachments. But in order for Forums to present the 'Add an attachment' option, Attachments is supposed to be mounted underneath Forums.

I tried to mount another attachments instance under forums, but Attachments is a singleton package. So then I unmounted it from the root and mounted it at /forums/attach. Now, Forums shows me the 'Add an attachment option', but it complains "Error: empty folder_id!". This seems to be a result of the fact that attachments_fs_root_folder_map is empty.

So, with this many errors, I'm thinking that I must be doing something wrong here. How do I setup Forums with Attachments?

Thanks

Vinod,

attachments is indeed NOT as singleton package. Instead it is designed to be mounted underneath the package instance that you would like to add attachments to. In you case you would have to mount attachments underneath the mounted forum instance. I can't remember if it requires a server restart. I belief it doesn't.

/Bart

One more reason to stick to the bboard package instead (for the time being)? Attachments work fine there.

Let me rephrase that ... if at some future point, some current user of bboards who wants to migrate to forums wants to write and provide migration scripts we would certainly include them.  I just don't have any plans to write them, and at the moment cleaning up forums probaby falls on my plate (there will be forums->forums-cleaned-up upgrade scripts provided, of course.)

bboard again ... It seems this package has got a bad reputation and for some reason "forum" is better. I always thought bboard was one of the core "standard" packages of ACS at all, and, having a high version number, would be fairly well developed. That was probably a wrong judgement ...

In your OpenACS 5 announcements I found that one of the plans is to give more information on the status of the different packages. That would be very good! In the present state, when you are new to OpenACS (like me), it is even hard to find out what a certain package is good for.

When aD first released ACS 4.0, many of the packages for it were also arbitrarily assigned a 4.0 version number, even though they were in fact mostly entirely new, and should have been version 1.0 (or even 0.9 or whatever, for that matter). Thus high version numbers for those old packages don't signify much of anything.