New forum software for V2

Posted September 30, 2008 by Ash Comments Off

What’s this? Another update on Ausrobotics v2???? No your eyes  aren’t deceiving you, this is an update!

 AR V2 has taken a lot longer than expected unfortunately, mainly due to the fact that I haven’t until now been able to find any good forum software to replace the rubbish that Drupal currently provides (also I have been building a scale model of the most powerful particle accelerator on the planet but that is another story). Early this week I finally found a solution that seems to tick all of the boxes. These boxes are:

 

  • Seamless integration with Wordpress sign-in (you don’t want to log in twice do ya?)
  • It actually looks like a semi-traditional forum (unlike things like bbpress/vanilla)
  • Good feature set (like email, private messaging, etc)
  • Support that won’t disappear overnight (More than one person developing it preferably)
After a lot of looking around I finally settled on Simple: Press Forum [ http://www.stuff.yellowswordfish.com/simplepress-forum/ ].
It has all of the items above and a lot more and it is actually implemented as a wordpress plugin so it integrates more than seamlessly with existing users etc.
It also has a cool feature where you can make a forum post from a blog post and vice versa.
 
It’s up at http://www.ausrobotics.com if you want to check it out. The themeing is just stock for now and my current import script is slightly broken in that it isn’t mapping the drupal forum posts to the correct topics yet :) But I’ll be working on that over the next couple of nights.
 
The user db has been migrated from here to the new site as well so feel free to sign in and muck around. It will all be wiped on the next migration anyway. Also things could be up and down as I work on em so  if anything weird happens that is probably why.