I should have spent more time reading forum related material in the past but now I need to urgently understand how to create a forum with a community. I basically want what is here on the Joomladay.org.au site and I believe that is using Community Builder and Fireboard?

I have been asked to build a professional website that has a forum where users can log in and discuss specific business-related topics. But the caveat is that users cannot register themselves - they need to be invited to the forum by the administrator. Does anyone know if Fireboard (or the new Kunena) can allow this?

And can anyone shed some light on why Fireboard is now called Kunena?

Next question - should I be looking at phpBB instead of Kunena? I'm a bit confused as you can see.

I know there's a lot of buzz around the JomSocial extension but it looks way to 'social' for this business based website so I think I'm going to go for Community Builder but would appreciate anyone's thoughts on Kunena vs phpBB and how easy it is to install phpBB and bridge the two...

Many thanks for anyone who wants to provide their insights...!

Someone else asked something similar last week to me.

Not in the same order as you've asked them, but here's some answers.

phpBB vs Kunena... go with Kunena if you are going with Joomla. phpBB is a very good dedicated forum, but doesn't nicely integrate with Joomla. It's also not as easy to modify and upgrade as using Joomla is.

Fireboard vs Kunena... like Simpleboard and Joomlaboard preceeded Fireboard, Kunena's the latest fork in the list, with the Kunena developers being the group of developers that had been building Fireboard. Difference this time is that they're rewritten the core so it's J1.5 native, instead of just recoding the J1.0 legacy code from Fireboard. The plan on here is to update next to Kunena.

JomSocial vs CB... I'm a CB person myself, but more due to having integrated it into a dozen sites in 3 years. But that said, the solution I would consider for what you're trying goes as follows...

- Determine the link to your registration page URL, and copy it for later reference
- On all the public parts of the site where there may be a login link visible (mod_login, or mod_cblogin as it will be) disable the registration link from being visible.
- Turn off the register option in Kunena
- Make the menu item for the forum "Registered" Access Level (or Public if you want the forum visible to those who aren't logged in).
- Now to the registrations... either the site administrator needs to create a new user details for each person, or to invite them, needs to send them the link from step 1 above in the email, so they can then sign up to the site with their own preferred details.

There's also a plugin for CB called CB invite that would let other users be able to invite users to join the site, sending them the rego link along the way.

Aside from that, I'd try and talk the client around about their limited and manually intensive method of registering people on the site... if they're looking to grow a community of like minded people discussing business issues, then making signing up and participating a little more automated would certainly be the way to go.

Patrick, Your advice is immensely helpful, as always. You've just summed up many hours of potentially frustrating reading for me - so thank you very very much.

Yes a superb answer Patrick. I agree with all.
I've used all of the above, and yes even I (with my glee about jomsocial) would use CB+Kunena in this case.

Well, I'll throw a spanner in the works here perhaps.

I haven't used Forums on sites for quite some time, but when I did I always chose to go with SMF because of its simplicity of use, its powerful features and for the many security features and feed features it offered.

With a private forum, this is perhaps even more important in that I would imagine that the owners would want to be aware of all posts to the Forum. SMF can send notifications on every board.

I have only recently come across JFusion as an extension and haven't integrated it into any sites as yet. However, it promises to provide integration directly with SMF and Joomla 1.5 from the reading I have done. I'm looking forward to deploying this extension in time.

I agree with the comments regarding JomSocial. I haven't used it as yet and simply because of the comments made here about it being "too social". It just doesn't fit the model of most business sites. I may deploy it on loddonalive.com.au in the future.

Hope this helps Jen...


Cheers,

Ric

PS.. You can see one of my SMF Forums operating at www.bushverse.com It isn't a Joomla site, but it has served me very well for several years now.

Jen, may I add another spanner too?

I'm a phpbb forum administrator, and yes, though it is a bit of a handful to maintain (only for plugins & modules really, though), I find it excellent.

And if you're a RocketTheme member, you'll find that they've got integrated themes for some of their templates to keep the look consistent and seamless. Their support is excellent too.

cheers,
Sue

Thanks Sue. I'm actually seriously considering it because I am using a Rockettheme template for this particular site and its tempting to have a template that fits in so well. And yes, their support is excellent.

I'm still doing some reading and will be doing some initial testing this weekend so I'll keep you all updated on what I go with.

Thanks again for people putting their two bobs worth in - being a member of the Joomla User Group is priceless.

Ric,
I have been doing some more reading on SMF and the JFusion bridge to make it work in Joomla and it does look like a nice option but from what I read, bridges are not great for speed. On the www.joomlaperformance.com website they mention to:


Have you had any experience with SMF slowing down your sites that you've used it on?

Hi Jen,

As I said in my post, I haven't set up a forum for a while. The last one I did was on www.helpviatwitter.com where I used the Agora Forum.

I wasn't really happy with it because I wanted to be alerted every time there was a post and it didn't do this. There is a new release out, so it may now be included.

I liked SMF because it had every feature you could wish for as an Admin without being overly complicated like some forum software.

Bridges will cause slight difficulties with Joomla for sure, but then again so does running in legacy mode. Sometimes a price has to be paid and it depends on what the price is that you are willing to pay. For me, anything but going to legacy.. LOL...

Cheers,


Ric

You've got a good point there!

BTW Jen, just found out this morning that Virtuemart run SMF. Oddly enough it was because their Forum wasn't working and that standard SMF message was displayed.

Cheers,

Ric

A quick update for those who read this thread, I have finally got my forum live. I went with CB and Kunena and luckily Kunena just went 1.5 native about 2 weeks before I was ready to show my client so I quickly did the upgrade so it was great to get rid of the legacy mode.

I tested JomSocial but just didn't like the look and feel and thought it would be way too much configuring to cut it back to a business like forum.

Here's the link if anyone wants to see it - looks like any other Kunena Forum but thanks to Alice it is orange and matches the branding of the site. http://www.illumaconsulting.com.au/forum

It took some learning and I had to purchase and read the CB manual with a fine tooth comb (several times) but in the end I can happily say that it is all very user-friendly to set up so thanks for those who gave their 2-bob worth in recommending what I use.

Regards,
Jen

The site is looking really nice Jen. You've done a great job. Very nice to see that the site title on the Forum leads back to the home page of the site too instead of the home page of the Forum which is always frustrating.

So glad you were able to avoid legacy mode too. My policy is that if it involves legacy, then it doesn't happen....

Cheers,


Ric

Hey Jen

Thanks for the follow-up post. Interesting to hear your choice and the forum looks great.

Kunena native at last!!

Dex

Ok, now that I have a forum up and running I was wondering what other people did when they need to do updates to the site - do they take the forum offline for a while?

sually when I update a site I take a full copy of the files and the database, replicate the site on my localhost test server, do all my updates, make sure everything works, and then upload it all back. Usually I am doing updates to the database too which means I need to stop people using the forum. I'd just like to know how other people go about these things.

I am pretty useless when it comes to permissions and things on folders so I never know how to install new extensions, etc onto the live site (even if I've tested it on the test site first) so my process usually takes a good hour or two!

I do a backup of the site and db, take the site offline and do the updates live. A lot less mucking around than setting up on localhost. Mind you, if I'm installing something new to play with, I will do it locally to make sure everything is synergistic before adding it to the live site.

Cheers,

Ric

Ric, thanks for your input - I will do that next time which should save me some time.

I have a new question regarding my client's forum. She's just requested to have two new forum/categories added but wants them restricted to certain people to write on only. This sounds like something that Joomla 1.6 with its new ACL system could do, but not the current version of Joomla 1.5 - am I correct in that? If not, can someone tell me how I would go about this.

I guess if I am correct in my assumption above, my option would be to create a sub-domain for the new forum and allow access to that subdomain only for the special user group. It would mean creating a whole new version of Joomla, CB and Kunena though which sounds exhausting... any ideas/comments on whether I'm on the right track?

Thanks for any input as usual...
Jen

Hopefully Fireboard allows you to set those permissions, but if not, and it's not too late you could always switch to PhpBB3 which has a very nicely granulated permissions system and can definitely do what you require.

Hi Jen,

can you not simply make the selected users moderators of the new forum and lock the forum so that only moderators can write to it? Or am I missing something?

Cheers - David

Hi David,
That's a good idea - I hadn't though of. It sounds like it would work fine. I'll do some testing to make sure. Thanks for suggesting!
Regards,
Jenny