Create custom forum with great admin capabilities

[dhruba]

Hi

I m new to processwire and I found it very interesting and powerful. I want to make a forum with great admin power and great spam control system.

I want a

1) custom admin for end client

2) login/resister with captcha, activate using email verification and restrict

registration using regular expression on username and email.

3) members can post topic but it will unpublished until moderator publish it.

4) has sections - category - topics/replays.

5) admin can delete/block multiple users and it will delete their topics.

Any advice/guidance/feedback would be greatly appreciated THANKS.

[kongondo]

Hi dhruba,

Welcome to PW and the forums! There has been talk about a forum module for PW but nothing has materialised so far. There's these topics that could be of interest:

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3536-forum-integration-module/

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/572-release-discussions/

Could be relevant:

http://modules.processwire.com/modules/fieldtype-comments/

http://modules.processwire.com/modules/process-latest-comments/

[dhruba]

Thanks kongondo;

I have already read above articles. But I m not satisfied with the tutorial available on this site.

Their must be some good video tutorial with voice. Otherwise I like the concept behind the 

processwire but I m not able to understand totally.

Is there any concept of foreign key. Like if user is deleted all post and replies are deleted automatically

THANKS.

[kongondo]

There are some videos but nothing about forum modules I am afraid. 

About a foreign key and its use, I'll let the lead developers answer that. By post you refer to "forum" posts are you referring to the "Discussion" module I referenced above? I am not away of that but please feel free to ask in the support board of that module.

[diogo]

Just to give you an idea of the huge task that you are looking for, not even these forums were done with Processwire. But besides behing a CMS, PW is also an excellent framework  suitable for building anything that you would build on another framework. Including a forum.

As for your question: You could build a module that hooks on page delete, checks if the page is a user (if template is "user" would be enough), and looks for all the pages (posts would likely be pages in PW) that were created by that user to delete them.

You could also simply delete the pages by the user by his request. Considering that it would be the user deleting himself, just look for his pages and delete them before deleting the user:

foreach($pages->find("createdUser=$user") as $p) {
    $p->delete();
}

If you are aware of the amount of small tasks you will have to code to create the forum, this gives you an idea of how easy is to solve them with PW.

[DaveP]

Is there any concept of foreign key. Like if user is deleted all post and replies are deleted automatically

Problem with deleting all a user's posts & replies is that can break up the conversation flow. Better to leave posts & replies and to mark them as by 'Deleted User'? (Or maybe change username to user id - i.e. anonymise posts, but leave them in place.)

[dhruba]

Thanks

diogo I got  some idea to solve my problem. you are right PW is a nice and powerful framework. I am new to PW but I m loving it because of it suitable for  developer, designer and end client. In PW's database, all fields are tables that's little bit confusing but very flexible as far as I understand the workflow of PW.

DaveP you are right  but for that the forum should have great registration process to control false registration. I need some  good spam control technique to secure my forum and less maintenance time.

[diogo]

In PW's database, all fields are tables that's little bit confusing but very flexible

That's why I would avoid working directly with the db tables. The db structure was built to maximize the power of the API, and this is PW's big strength. You can accomplish virtually everything with the API in a very cool and easy way If you forget the db and focus on the tree.