A bulletin board using dokuwiki

No, wait. There’s nothing finished here. The idea has just been on my mind for years, so I thought, I probably just write it down for me or others to develop at some point.

The basic question is: Can I use dokuwiki as a bulletin board/forum system? If I’m using dokuwiki for –well, virtually anything, I want to embed a forum in it!

So, first things first: What is a forum or bulletin board? Ah, I call it forum from now on. You know, what I mean.

It’s basically a grouped bunch of posts, ordered by creation date. Each post comes from an author, can include quotes from other posts and one can subscribe to be noticed of new posts.

So, let’s bring it down to features:

* Support multiple forums and subforums
* Support threads – that is one starting posts and countless posts under it
* Support paging of posts
* Support closing of threads
* Support subscribing posts
* Support avatars
* Support Signup for the forum

Am I missing a feature here? Comment this blog entry!

Okay, now, how to organize posts. I could use the comments-plugin to comment on posts, but I feel, that I’m to limited with that. A better way would be to really use different pages for each post and to separate forum-pages from threads by metadata:


forums:forum1:subforum1:thread1


„forum1“ and „subforum1“ would get a metadata „forum“ and „thread1“ would get a metadata „thread“. So the plugin would know, when to render a forum and when to render a thread (or, actually, where to search for threads)

Posts to „thread1“ would be subpages:


forums:forum1:subforum1:thread1:post1
forums:forum1:subforum1:thread1:post2


The rest would be simple rendering.

Paging is done multiple times in plugins. It’s basically cut and paste for most of the time. Check.

Closing threads would be a bit complicated. Sure, I could just close the thread by hindering the user to add new posts using my renderer, but he could still simply make new posts by navigating to the corresponding dokuwiki-page.

I **could** use the ACL-system to completely forbid writing to the thread-namespace. The question is, if that wouldn’t make the ACL completely cluttered. I’d guess so.

Subscribing posts. Yes. Simple. Subscribe thread-namespace. Period. Check.

Avatars. That’s just a renderer issue. I will use gravatar here. Check.

Signup to the forum would be signing up to a dokuwiki account and granting access to a standard „forum“-group. That should be no problem. Check.

So it seems to be fairly easy. The „closing“-thing could become a bit harsh, so that’s definitely something to look into.

But overall it should work. I just need to find the time and passion to actually develop this. Any volunteers reading this?