The new Community Forum in 980

Maybe you read on the GX Developerweb forum, on Twitter or in your RSS feed that we released GX WebManager 9.8 and that it contains a 'Community Forum'. So you might ask: a forum? Wasn't that part of like eeehm... GX WebManager 3.1? Yes, a forum component has been part of GX WebManager for a long time and forums have been part of the internet for at about 15 years. But you can't deny the fact that many of our customers and visitors are active on forums and that forums still play an important role in communities and other websites.

For communities

Therefore we decided to upgrade our forum with some exciting new functionality that makes it perfect to integrate with communities. And we called it....the Community Forum. First of all it's a community forum because it's related to our new GX Profiler module. GX Profiler is all about users, which are key for any community. Users form the heart of any community so from an engagement perspective you'd probably want to know as much about them as possible and offer them the best experience. The community forum uses GX profiler to extend the existing user profile with special fields for forum purposes, such as a 'about me' description, an avatatar and fields you see on forums such as MSN address, linkedin profile etc.

Another reason to call it a community forum is because it supports frontend moderation which makes it easy to assign moderators and they can moderate discussions without having to login to GX WebManager or without requiring professional editors. Also RSS feeds and 'watch this item' buttons are added to make it easy for community members to stay involved with discussions. Is that all? No. We also added Karma, last post shown, easy sorting, UBB codes & smilies, AJAX updates, flood control and last but not least: SEO URLS to increase your Google ranking.

Give it to me!

Getting the forum up and running is easy. You have to download the forum add-on on Developerweb and follow the steps below. These steps are aimed at installing the forum in the Community Edition (9.8.0 or newer).

• deploy the forum-1.0.0.jar on your installation
• Login to GX WebManager
• Go to Configure > 'Community Forum configurations'
• Click on 'create forum config' and enter a name
• Create a new page and add the forum element to the page. You'll see a message that you have to create a webuser first.
• Remove all the right page sections from the page in order to create more space on the page. (File > Properties > Assign page sections to page)
• Go to Configure > User Profiles
• Go to the 'Groups' tab and create a new group called 'Forum moderators'.
• Go to the 'User profiles' tab and create a new webuser with at least a user name, password and name. Set 'has confirmed' to 'yes'
• Go to the 'groups' tab and assign the user to the group 'Forum moderators'
• Go to the forum tab and enter an 'about me'  message and an avatar.

• Go to the website and go to Examples > Personalization. There's a login form on the page. Login with your username and password
• Go to the forum page and click on the 'New topic' button

You can change all the forum messages and additional settings in the /web/setup under 'forum_configuration'. If you miss something in the steps above you can always consult the online help that's included with the forum WCB.

And you can drop your comments and suggestions about the Community forum or Developerweb forum in the ... forum :-)

Enjoy!

Martin