Forum OpenACS Development: Anybody intrested in porting phpBB to OpenACS

Hi,

I have used phpBB for a while and I am convinced that it has the best features as far as a bulletin board goes, I was wondering if anybody was intrested in porting it over to openACS, as i dont know much about developing stuff for open ACS, I would need somebody's guidance and help, and I'll do all that I can and more as I get to know more of openACS Development.

~somik
mailto:somik@naesc.org

Somic, can you please list the features of phpBB that are absent on this forum (which is an instance of OpenACS forums package)?

Hi guys,
        I am glad to see the intrest build up, well personally me and lot others are there who feel that phpBB is the best as far as forums/BB 's go and thats the reason it was ported by the postnuke and phpnuke and phpwebsite projects.
+ Points for phpBB

  -> more than 50 excellent themes that can be implemented with the click of a button
      http://www.phpbb.com/styles/styles_demo/
  -> Private messaging - Private message INBOX

  -> Better group management and administration and lot of easy admin features

  ->compliant with XHTML 1.0, consistent style using CSS.

  -> Its pretty much the most aestheticlly designed and best open source BB outthere.

Any Q's , please direct to me..

~Somik

css, that is irrelevant as anyone can modify a stylesheet and most sites do use it.

OACS is a toolkit, not a standalone app. I personally don't care about themes, but we have skins.

Tell me Technically why phpBB is better. Most all you have given is eyecandy which anyone can program with a little html. Private messages - I don't see the point, send me email.

Technically I imagine it would be that the community admin UI is far superior than ours.  Vadim's right in that the OpenACS paradigm is that the core (subsite, actually) manages this for all packages.  In this sense it makes NO SENSE to port phpBB's  admin features to our forums package, because that's the wrong place to do user and group admin stuff in our multi-package environnment.

Somik may not be aware of our community admin pages if he's just looked at the forums package, but if he were he'd see quickly that they suck :)

Fortunately Lars Pind has already committed to spending time working up an admin UI for OpenACS, and we already have one volunteer willing to help implement better admin UI for the toolkit.  And we're going to be looking at migrating relevant admin UI bits and pieces from dotLRN to the main toolkit.

So things are going to be getting vastly better in this area the next few months.

As far as 50 themes ... I'd love to see people start making available different skins for the toolkit. Mostly to demonstrate to folks that it's easy to do.  The place to do that, though, is the subsite level not the forums level.  We aren't quite 100% there regarding consistent use of CSS but we're talking about it for 4.7.

In fact it probably wouldn't be that hard to swipe phpBB's themes and recast them for OpenACS subsites if anyone thinks they're attractive enough to bother with.

Somik ... visit https://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/

This is just a subsite mounted under openacs.org that has a different skin than the main openacs.org site.  It's a very simple skin - really just the header is being skinned in this case - but that should give you the general idea, i.e. that you can mount a new subsite and give it a different skin.  You also control user membership and all that at the subsite level.  If you mount a forums package under a subsite like the dotLRN subsite it automatically inherits the skin for that subsite.

So this is where the effort goes ... making subsites better, not writing an individual package that has its own theming etc etc.

And as for the most easy to add feature of these - smileys (aka emoticons) are already in the cvs version of forums.

I'd like to throw in my support for this idea.
I looked at OpenACS in the pre- and early 4.5 days last year and found its polish lacking. It's getting better, and bboards have gotten immensely better functionally, but it's time to take the last step and become slickified :)

First my outlook:
-phpBB is clearly the most visible, 'winning' open bulletin board system. Ergo, OpenACS immediately and automatically stands to learn from it--simply by virtue of 'what is phpBB doing to be so widely used?'
-Besides the continued dependence on aolserver (which I'm not against--let me finish the point), I believe that OpenACS needs strongly to fix social 'bugs' preventing uptake. The toolkit needs to have a strong out of the box experience, and bboards is arguably the most important experience that stands between now and wider use.

Private Messaging: increases stickyness of the site, as Vadim alluded to. Include it as an option--let's not let this be something easy to implement that will be counted as a drawback by users and socially-aware implementers

Streamlined Admin: this cannot be overemphasized, e.g. in response to Jon and Vadim. Although we may know that OpenACS is a toolkit with all these cool sub-site and general admin features, out of box is paramount. It must be dirt-simple to set up a bboard and--dare I say it--delegate bboard admining to a pool of admins and give them an experience similar to the most successful phpBB sites. Whether this OOB experience is implemented as a careful rewrite of overall admin or as a special package-specific extension, the end experience has to be streamlined.

What I think is so striking about phpBB is how impressively well stitched its UI is... not to denigrate anyone here, but phpBB leaves an indelible impression with its default and many of its other skins (another great example close to home: http://forums.gentoo.org ). I don't have a quick answer to this either except that we need to continue to refine the look. I can predict that the ruling text-oriented camp may need to be supplemented with a camp of people dedicated to making the UI (or one skin/version of it) as polished and graphics-inclusive as phpBB is (an objection I fully expect to gather from many oacs regulars).

Oh yeah, lastly: fun there is a 'serious' quality about oacs; there is a 'fun' quality about many bboards, esp. phpBB ones, and esp. ones with some level of Avatar customization capability. This is a must-have (if optional) feature IMO.
I am of course volunteering to help Lars and whomever in this endeavor... still getting my dev env setup... dang interruptions...

I think there OpenACS is coming into an age wherein some people expect it to be good out of the box.  I hope it does become more polished, but it should be always remembered that OpenACS exists because its a toolkit.  Its a toolkit that individuals and compinies use to service their clients.  A well polished OpenACS I believe will likely come not from here but from a company.  Similar to Linux and the different distrobutions.

Since this thread has gathered enough eyeballs I think if a group of people interested in porting phpBB then they should do it.  Once the new package or modified forums are there, and the community sees that its better then it will likely be integrated into OpenACS.  This situation is no different from forums and bboard.  OF decided that bboards was not good enough, so they made forums.  The community agrees and now forums is part of OpenACS and is used in openacs.org.

P.S.

Has anybody noticed that pressing "Cancel" when you post still posts and not cancel the post. :)

Jun,

Re the cancel button: Yes. This is due to the way the cancel button was implemented originall, where each form page had to explicitly check for and handle the cancel button. This is now fixed in CVS, but this site hasn't been upgraded.

Consequently, I've removed the Cancel button for now.

/Lars

Don,

what I think chris means by "fun" is easy to use UI, that makes the "look & feel" inviting, and no matter how robust the system may be, the ease of use and look and feel makes the difference in having people adapt to a new system, and thats the reason, two of the post popular community building systems on the web http://www.postnuke.org/ and http://www.php-nuke.org/ ( I have seen more projects on these platforms and am more familiar with them than OACS, so excuse my ignorance about some of the OACS topics). These two communities have their own BB, but they ended up porting phpBB and some ppl making similar solutions, cause it had superior capabilities than their own BB-MODULE, and with this I am trying to imply there is a lot of stuff we can learn from their friendly UI and implement in OACS, if there are couple of good graphics designers out there and with all of guys' technical talents it shouldnt be that big a project to make better UI's for most of the OACS modules which ppl see, with some good designers and minor changes you can make OACS Bboard much more appealing and the same stands true for more many other modules. The debate on this topic has been great and I think something comes out of it, that would make OACS a far more appealing solution.

~Somik

Just a short note, the popular cms's based on php-nuke didn't "port" phpbb2 to anything, both, *nukes and phpBB2 applications are php/mysql driven, the *nukes encapsulated phpBB2, basically stripping out the guts and stuck it unto a frame, changed some of the queries to share userDB's and preferences.

Moving phpBB2 would require a complete rewrite to have it fully integrated into the OpenACS framework as everything else currently is...Or at least alot more work than turning it into an add-on for current php/mysql applications.

But in the end, I am with most everyone else, Bulletin Boards/Forums are an add-on for me, content is King! If I wanted a thriving Bulletin Board community, then I would find the best Bulletin Board application I could and build a site around it.

With OpenACS, I have a great platform for building content! Static page support, Lars-Blogger, general comments, edit-this-page, a great Bug-Tracker, Ticket Tracker Lite, on-line calendar, Lar's Bookshelf, and on and on, none of which appear in phpBB2, and many of the packages can't be found in any of the *nukes. Much of what is in a *nuke is more of a "oh that's a nice add-on" and of true limited value...

No; for me, the current work and goals are in line with my needs, I am hoping to leverage some of the packages currently available into a new application I am planning now for building this summer, but probably later 😊.

I think everyone is on track and I really like the direction OpenACS is taking, later this month I will be completing a migration of our office intranet from OpenACS 3.2.5/php-nuke 5.2 to OpenACS 4.6 pure...

Just wanted to add my perspective as a user and integrater who is glad to be getting away from the php/mysql ties that bind...

Well, not so short...