eForum

Description

An open source project to develop a component-based Forum package. The components in the package can be used for a number of different kinds of Forums, including:

• Public forums, where postings can be from any user
• Private forums, where users must be logged in to post
• Moderated forums, where messages are reviewed and approved by a moderator before being posted to the forum.

Online discussion groups, or forums, allow geographically distant participants to share ideas. The discussion forum enhances teamwork and discussion groups. Use the eForum to manage community interest groups, enhance interactivity, increase traffic, develop customer loyalty, and increase site value. 

Through forums, project managers can manage feedback or project discussions, and can display interactive Q&A tools.  The intent is that it can be used for feeding a FAQ.

With messages stored in a database, and classified by topic, it is capable of building a powerful knowledge base. This is an ideal project to tie into the Search Engine component to quickly find information need by searching by keywords, topics, titles, authors’ names, descriptions and other criteria.

Features

All the functions listed here are available in eForum.

Unlimited Forums
Allows you to build an unlimited number of forums. You can produce a single forum, or a different forum for each department, target audience, topic or product. 

Multi-Level Forums
The Forum components support Groups, Threads within Groups, and Messages within a Thread. Groups can also have multipurpose "attributes" assigned, so that custom types of groups can be supported.

Threaded Discussion
The discussion forum enhances teamwork and discussion groups through threaded discussion. A thread is arranging message links or message contents in a tree-like structure to reflect post/reply relationship..

• Allows users to subscribe to groups of interest and view messages by visiting the domain, or email delivery of messgages posted.
• llows users to participate in the Forum by posting messages in a given thread and reply to messages
• Allows users to list all categories of messages and see how many messages are in each category
• Allows users to list all the messages in a given category and see how many replies there are to each message
• Allows users to list the replies to a particular message
• Allows users to be informed about which member has posted a message or replied to a message

Forum Administration

• Allows you to create, update and delete forums. 
• Set or modify moderation rights
• Enables message structure of forums, i.e. allow attachments
• Allows ordering, moving and sort messages
• Modify topic headings
• Edit content 
• Administer whether to verify messages before placing them online
• and perform other administrative functions.

Forum Moderation
Facilitates complete control over published content by allowing moderation of a forum. If desired defined moderators can verify messages before placing them online.  Forum displays a page showing all messages awaiting verification in all forums. 

Expresso Security Management
By using the underlying Expresso Framework layer, you can create user groups and allocate them specific task rights. A range of access rights enables you to distribute forum-related tasks to a high degree of specificity.

Entire groups of users can be collectively enabled or excluded from viewing or participating in specific forums or groups of forums. Open your forums to a global audience, or limit access to specific user groups.

Email Support
Email interaction (e.g. posting to the forum and forwarding from the forum to email addresses) is supported.

Flexible Message Management
Easily move messages from one topic to another, gaining flexibility and precision in the display of information.

Advanced Search Capability
Ties into the Search Engine component. Search messages by date range, title, author, keywords, topics. Searches are fast and on target, and result in a manageable list of relevant results.

Rich Content Support - future enhancement
Forum messages can display attachments in a variety of media – .pdf, .jpeg, image, video, audio and much more. Messages can be supported by documents and multimedia files, making professional discussions more efficient and descriptive.

Product Setup

The user interface can be servlets, JSP or applet/application, as required for the specific forum use. The persistance mechanism (e.g. the way the forum stores it's information) is also configurable, with an example implementation using any JDBC database.

The eForum components are designed to either be embedded into a larger application (such as the Apache JetSpeed project) or used as a standalone Forum product. For more information, please see the installation notes.

We would welcome your involvement on this project. We invite you to join our community of developers if you feel you are ready for it and wish to give a hand and contribute back to the group at large and to benefit. Here is an idea of where we are headed if you view this mockup.  To get involved inproduct development efforts, email us for more information.