My implementation uses some ideas from the bboards packages but it uses none of the bboards code. Email alerts was one of the features I borrowed from the OpenACS boards (using the idea of map tables to map messages to subscribers). However, I left out some of the other bboard features, not sure which ones, but the OpenACS bboard experts will be able to see what seems similar and what doesn't. All of the messages have a tree_sortkey and a parent_id which helps me build the hierarchy. Thanks to everyone who worked on the "connect by" solution!
Also what you don't see is the news and articles sections (you can guess the URLs for those sections) which are directly integrated with the forums code. It's similar to the general comments package in OpenACS 3 where you can respond to any page, but I hard coded it because it was easier to do it that way :) Again, those responses are threaded just like the rest of the forums. The articles package allows you to upload files (.zip, .tar.gz) into a special (not CMS) area. It uncompresses the files and places them in a special directory. If you have HTML files, it will suck it into the database, and it will modify the links (img src and a href) to make the file paths correct. You can also create/edit articles online. I chose not to use the CMS because I couldn't figure out how to use it properly and because my client didn't really need to worry about tracking revisions.
Oh yeah, and there's an ad management package there too. I'm still working on the layout for that part.
Cynthia - please tell me more about the "voodoo headers".
Jonathan - you can switch to a threaded mode (ie non-ubb mode). There are some links at the top of the forum index page (thread, fancy, flat) which will allow you to go to your favorite thread layout. It's hard to see the links and we're going to make it a graphic so it's more obvious.
Yes, my current plan is to release the whole package at some point in the near future (in a month or two). But first, I need to clean up the code and work out all of the bugs. My vision is that this will be either a separate distribution of OpenACS 4 (ie out of the box functionality) or you can use the APM to download the necessary parts and patch the core code with my tweaks.
