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Discussion, comments, questions etc. about FoxForum

Put your latest comment at the top please!

(3-Oct-2008) Fox Forum Right-to-Left.
I am trying to create an Arabic forum using Fox Forum. As with most recipes, there is plenty of adjustments to make, but I have not managed to make the topic generation work. The pages are created with arabic titles, and the topic is visible in the main forum page, but the text its not readable.

It seems some letters of the alphabet, like the 'mim' (م), are causing problems when included in the topicname, causing the main text to come out as {�ال.ForumAr}. If I type a subject with latin letters, the page works fine.

Do you have any suggestions on how to make the forum work better with rtl languages? (I guess the easiest fix would be to give an alternative name to the topic pages, based on FoxCount, for instance, instead of the subject typed in Arabic.) - Regards, VG.

I am out of my depth here, never had any experience with RTL or arabic. Perhaps the best is to modify the form creating new topics, so that perhaps a purely number based name is used, or a ISO-date and number combination. Then have the arabic topic as input for the page title. For serial names generated through a markup expression please see PowerTools#serialname. For apurely numeric page name I think the form of Forum.CreateNewTopic could have instead of

this:

and in the (:fox....:) markup set redirect=1 (not $$topicpage), remove parameters foxgroup=... and pagecheck=... Pagecheck is not necessary, as the new target page is always an incremental from the previous one, so an existing page will not become target for a new topic page.

 - HansB

Thanks! This works nicely. However, I have a few other difficulties getting the forum working smoothly. Maybe you have some ideas what might cause this:

• On the topic page, deletelinks are translated for comments but not for topic post. The display template look the same for both. The comment editlink is also biggger than that of the topic, but both translate without problems.

There appears to be a bug on page FoxTemplates.FormTemplates section #newtopic:
please replace in the (include ...:) markup
deletelink="{[foxdelrange Delete Topic]}"
with
deletelink="{[foxdelrange '$[Delete Topic]']}"
which lets you use a XL page to translate the string 'Delete Topic', or just use your own string, but make sure it is in single quotes. - HansB

• Clicking on the editlink just brings up an empty subject and textbox.Edit: downloading the latest version of fox.php fixed this problem.
• Previews are not working, displaying a box with (:foxpreview:) inside, and the template text beneath. Example for the editform: (:foxpreviewtemplate “{$$ptv_subject001} \n----\n\n{$$ptv_message001}”:) . My Blog (blogsimple.php) shows some similar behaviour, with a (:nogroup:) markup visible on the main page. Is there a recipe I am missing or something? Edit: downloading the latest version of fox.php fixed this problem.

Cheers, VG.

(4-July-2008)

When a new topic is created, then the topic does not automatically become the new subject. The first item on the comment page therefoe has no subject before it is edited. How can I make the topic to show up as a default subject? Replacing {{$$subject}} by {*$Namespaced} in the display template fixes it, but it that the idea? Latest release - JHJ

I thik the best may be to edit the page FoxTemplates.FormTemplates section #newtopic, and replace (::subject001:::) with (::subject001:{$$topic}::), which will insert the topic subject as the 'subject' ptv. Maybe I should make this the default. The reason I did not do this is that I did not wish to duplicate the topic as page title in the 'subject' field. The display configuration can of course suppress the subject field, not showing it, but using the normal edit form will show a subject field. This could be suppressed as well, with a conditional on the post number, not showing the subject input field for post 001. But I had avoided too much complexity in the forms, they are very high already. - HansB July 04, 2008, at 01:30 AM

(5-July-2008) Thanks! This works fine for my context now. However, in the main forum display I also changed [[{=$FullName}|'''{=$Titlespaced}''']] to [[{=$FullName}|'''{{=$FullName}$:subject001}''']] so that the changed subject is reflected in the forum topic. I needed this fix because when users enter a new topic, they sometimes make spelling and other mistakes. They then want to back and correct them. With these changes this is possible although the error still remains in the now invisible file name. JHJ, July 06 2008

(29-June-2008)

Is it possible to enable preview for FoxForum so that I can preview my post before I submit it?

- Daniel

It is not possible at the moment. I will think about if it could be done. - HansB June 30, 2008, at 10:02 AM UPDATE: Now possible with latest release! - HansB July 03, 2008, at 05:55 AM

Great! Thank you very much! - Daniel

(17-June-2008)

I am getting the following errors when I try to edit a test comment or an original topic entry:

Fatal error: [] operator not supported for strings in /home/asterisk/html/cookbook/fox/fox.php on line 641

Has anyone run into anything like this before?

Karl

What version? Try the latest fox.phpΔ - HansB June 17, 2008, at 04:10 PM

(14-May-2008)

Hans,

it seems TableEdit has the same problem as SectionEdit. Do you know of any way to fix this problem?

Thank you very much,

walter

You are right. Both recipes manipulate the (:include:) markup, and this breaks FoxForum. Make sure TableEdit is not included for the Fox forum group. - HansB

I added this code to my config.php:

$page = PageVar($pagename, '$FullName');
$group = PageVar($pagename, '$Group');
if($group!='Forum') {
include_once("$FarmD/cookbook/tabledit.php");
}

It works perfectly now. Thanks!

walter

(26-Feb-2008)

Hi Hans,

just found out that FoxForum got some problems with SectionEdit. Creating new topics works fine, but the site for a topic just comes up with some Variable-names ($$author, etc.) rather than their content. However, if I comment out sectionedit.php in my config file, all works fine.

Besides that, enabling sectionedit and setting its configuration to "$SectionEditInIncludes = false;" again works, although the Author's name now shows up in '\"'.

Thanks, Tobias

My guess is that SectionEdit has a problem with the (:include:) markup as used by FoxForum. SectionEdit does some text manipulations with included text. FoxForum uses (:include:) in a very sophisticated way, by including the same page (the display template) multiple times once for each message), and replacing replacement variables in the template page with values given in the markup. Note that this use is totally legal. I recommend to use FoxEdit for individual message editing. HansB February 27, 2008, at 03:42 AM

(07-Feb-2008)

Is it possible to alternate the colors of the forum topics? I find that having alternating colors makes it much easier to read a forum.

it is possible, but requires some modifications to a number of templates and the css. The basic idea would be this: when posting a comment the template which is used will insert an extra 0 or 1 after the {$DisplayCommentTemplate} var. This number is returned with a markup expression checking the $FoxCount var number and return 1 for odd numbers, 0 for even numbers. The DisplayTemplates need modifications, basically doubling each one and changing the anchors: [[#default0]], [[#default1]] etc., then changing the class names and changing the css sheet accordingly. The markup expression required is this:

$MarkupExpr['isodd'] = 'is_odd($args[0])';
function is_odd( $int ) {
  return( $int & 1 );
}

and the change for the form template FoxTemplates.FormTemplates#comment is {$DisplayCommentTemplate}{$$(isodd {$$FoxCount})} (adding the markup expression).

This solution is working, but I am not prepared to make the changes to the distributed forum, as it makes it even more complex. I hope you can do it yourself with these hints! HansB February 09, 2008, at 06:14 AM

(21-Jan-2008)

Hi Hans,

I installed the standard version and it was working fine. There's a problem with creating new topic. Every new topic is named Forum.SpanSpanTopicpage regardless of the topic name. This causes a problem when I try to create another topic as it overwrites the first topic. I made no changes in the files or configuration.

Thanks Max

(20-December-2007)

Hi Hans, I've just installed a standard version i.e. no forum name changes, using forum.forum etc. but with no captcha. New top and post all work fine but when I try to delete anything I get an Object Not Found 404 from trying to find "hxxp://usfosmesproj01/wiki//Forum.PilotProduct?action=foxdelete....."

Note the double / after "wiki" i.e "...j01/wiki//Forum..."

On all other pages with my Apache setup I see urls in the form "hxxp://usfosmesproj01/wiki/?n=Forum.PilotProduct" i.e. with the ?n=.

Any suggestions?

John Oakley

you can either configure your wiki to use clean Urls (see CleanUrls) or edit fox.php in this way: In the function FoxDeleteMarkup the line where it says return FmtPageName("<a class='foxdellink' change href='{$ScriptUrl}/{$targetname}?action=foxdelete... to href='{$PageUrl}?action=foxdelete... I will correct this in the next release. HansB December 20, 2007, at 02:30 PM

(19-December-2007)

Hi Hans,

it seems to me that there is a numbering problem, if 2 users are reading and writing at the same time.

If someone reads this topic 4 comments are shown. The last 2 comments both have number 3 and both have the text of user B. The authors name is shown correct, but number and text are shown twice.
Other examples are possible. Always the number of the first and the text of last of the conflicting postings are shown twice.

In the source file it seems to me, that everything except the number is stored correct. But the number is doubled.
Is the number for a new post calculated when reading the post? Than a fix could be to calculate the number when writing the post. Another, but dirty fix could be to show the text similar to the authors name, not depending on the number, but depending on the position in the source. But this could show side effects, because the numbering in the source will be wrong. The better fix in my view would be to avoid double numbers.

I have tested it with the last version.

NH

Your analysis is correct. The count is taken from a page text variable FoxCount, and incremented, and this is used for the comment post. The value used is the one read when the page is loaded, so yes in can be out of date, and should be read when the post is processed. Not sure how to do this right now. I used to not use a page text variable as counter, but write a var directly as a page attribute. HansB December 19, 2007, at 01:03 PM

Remedy: change in foxforum.php function FoxCountFilter to this:

function FoxCountFilter($pagename, $fx) {
      $fc = PageTextVar( $pagename, 'FoxCount');
      $fx['FoxCount'] = sprintf("%03d",$fc+1);
   return $fx;
} //}}}

(5-December-2007)

Broken version?

Is something broken in recent versions of Fox and FoxForum? I get the error

    ERROR: 'n' is not a legal field name.

with FoxForum straight out of the box, and had the same problem when trying to set up a basic Fox and ToDo recipe. -- krisku

(7-Dec-2007): I just found an explanation for the problem. I had set up my wiki to use the CleanUrls recipe using URL rewriting and the RewriteRule turned the referenced page name into a ?n=$1 query string. When I reconfigured my Apache to use mod_alias instead, I got rid of the "'n' is not a legal field name" problem... -- krisku

(24-November-2007)

Two shell scripts that you may find useful - dup.sh and upgrade.sh

This section will only work for linux/unix users with access to the command line. Windows users could maybe develop a similar script as a .bat, BASIC or java file.

dup.sh

This script will make the changes needed to make another forum. It takes template files that you create and modifies them to make the new forum.

# use from the command line
# ./dup.sh NewForumName

target="XTemplate"
source="zTemplate"

if [ $1 = "" ] || [ $1 = ${source} ]
then
        echo "No argument given or trying to copy the template file to itself"
        exit 1
else
        echo "Using $1"
        cp ${source}.CreateNewTopic $1.CreateNewTopic
        cp ${source}.Forum $1.Forum
        cp ${source}.ForumConfig $1.ForumConfig
        echo "Running sed on $1.php"
        cat ${source}.php | sed "s/${target}/${1}/g" > ${1}.php
fi

Before you use it you need to do some setup. You only need to do these steps once:

Setup Step 1: Copy these files, rename them, and put them into the same folder with the dup.sh script:

Setup Step 2: Modify this line in zTemplate.php

$FoxPagePermissions['Forum.*'] = 'all';

• change it to:

$FoxPagePermissions['XTemplate.*'] = 'all';

• Note it is XTemplate, not zTemplate.

Now you are ready to make a new forum

Step 1: Run the dup.sh script and pass it the name of the new forum name. For example: ChessForum

• ./dup.sh ChessForum
• Now you will have these files:
  1. ChessForum.php
  2. ChessForum.CreateNewTopic
  3. ChessForum.Forum
  4. ChessForum.ForumConfig
• And the ChessForum.php file will have:

$FoxPagePermissions['ChessForum.*'] = 'all';

Step 2: Move the files to the correct folders

• The .php file goes in your local folder.
• The other files go in the wiki.d folder.

In this example:

Step 3: Add a link to the forum to a wiki page.

In this example something like: [[ChessForum.Forum | Chess Forum]]

Thats it!

Now to make another forum you can simply:

1. run ./dup.sh NewForumName
2. move the files to the correct folders
3. add the link to a wiki page

Matt

(24-November-2007)

upgrade.sh

This script will help make the changes to upgrade foxforum from the pre 2007-10-22 releases to the post 2007-10-22 releases. This script uses the steps listed in the "Upgrade Note" in the "Release Notes" section of the Cookbook.FoxForum page.

# use from the command line
# ./upgrade.sh FileName

t1='{ForumConfig$:DisplayTopicTemplate}'
r1='{$DisplayTopicTemplate}'
t2='{ForumConfig$:DisplayCommentTemplate}'
r2='{$DisplayCommentTemplate}'
t3='text=$:comment'
r3='subject={$FullName}$:subject000 text={$FullName}$:comment'

if [ $1 = "" ]; then
        echo "No argument given"
        exit 1
else
        cp ${1} ${1}.old
        echo "Upgrade file $1"
        cat $1        | sed "s/$t1/${r1}/g" > ${1}.test
        cat ${1}.test | sed "s/$t2/${r2}/g" > ${1}.test
        cat ${1}.test | sed "s/$t3/${r3}/g" > ${1}.test
        rm ${1}
        mv ${1}.test ${1}
fi

The script looks in the forum.topic file for three target strings (t1, t2, and t3) and replaces them with three replacement strings (r1, r2, and r3) respectively.

Pass it the name of the forum you want to upgrade. An example would be upgrading your old ChessForum.Forum. Imagine that someone had posted a discussion about opening moves: ChessForum.Openers

To run the upgrade script you would type:

• ./upgrade.sh ChessForum.Openers

Note:

• The upgrade.sh script must be in the same folder as the Forum.
• This script adds .old to the original file name so that you can try it out first. The steps might look like this:

1. Run the upgrade script: ./upgrade.sh ChessForum.Openers
2. Test the upgrades in your wiki by viewing and refreshing the forum page(s)
3. If you like the changes then delete ChessForum.Openers.old
4. if you don't like the changes then:
   1. delete ChessForum.Openers and
   2. rename ChessForum.Openers.old back to ChessForum.Openers and
   3. things will be back as they were:

Matt

(19-August-2007) I got ForumX working nicely, but the topic display always returns one non-existing topic at the very bottom of the page. It looks like this: {=Full Name}? 0 {=$LastModified} {=$LastModifiedBy}. It is generated by the pagelist [[#forum]] template. How to eliminate it? JHJ.

(16-July-2007) I want to usecreate the Index Page to show all existing Topics but I can't find any hinstruction how to create the mentioned Index Page. please help Leftaf?

(29-June-2007) If you configure the forum for 20 posts per page - what happens to post #21? ~Matt

(25-June-2007) We're getting hit by the spambots but so far the "number verification" is holding up. Unfortunately, even if the poster doesn't enter the correct number, the thread's "last posted by" is shown as the poster's name and the datestamp (hence ordering) is revised. Is there any way we can prevent this? -- JLuk

(12-June-2007) Tip: make sure you don't have an anchor named #forum on your page, because that is also the name of the default pagelist format style!! Took me hours to figure out why my page wasn't displaying!

Also, a few bug reports:

• The escape sequence used to close the post is, unfortunately, a very commonly used smiley :) ... if a user enters the smiley, the post is closed off at that point. Is it possible to somehow escape that sequence? Even translating it into another kind of smiley should be an okay temporary fix.
• (a minor one) if the user enters the wrong access code, the message is rejected but the counter still increases. -- JLuk

(9-June-2007) (Bug report deleted as it was fixed in the latest version. If you're curious, see the History. Thanks, HansB! We are now running a site for 400-member alumni association using your FoxForum.) -- JLuk

Hallo! Above is spoken about pub/ files but foxforum.zip contains only local and cookbook directories?
Next using Forum a first time I get PERMISSION DENIED to edit Forum.FirstTitle! trying to get a page "FirstTitle" (test).
PKHG 070517:1332

Did you copy local/Forum.php to your local/ directory? local/Forum.php contains the local customisations for the forum, for group Forum, including the $FoxPagePermission setting. If you use a different group, you need to rename the file and change this setting. - The referenc eto the pub/ folder was outdated, sorry! I removed it now. HansB May 17, 2007, at 02:50 PM