SilvaForum
What is it?
SilvaForum is an extension for Silva that provides a classic discussion forum environment. Site visitors can create topics (subjects or questions) and add comments to existing topics.
Using Silva Forum
After enabling the Silva Forum extension you can create a Silva Forum content in the Silva Management Interface: this will be the forum. The public interface of the Forum allows site visitors to add topics (subjects) to the forum, and comments (messages) to the topics. The topics and comments are accessible from the management interface by site editors for editing and moderation purposes.
Managing Access
Consulting the forum
By default, the forum, topic and comments are viewable by unauthenticated people like any other Silva content. If you wish to restrict this, you can use the default access restriction feature of Silva to do so (located in the management interface, in the access tab). For more information about this, please consult the Silva user documentation.
Posting new topics and comments
By default you need to be authenticated to be able to post a topic or a comment.
For unauthenticated visitors, a link on a forum or a topic will let them authenticate in order to be able to post.
A site manager can, per forum or per topic, authorize unauthenticated people to post. This is configured in the management interface in the settings screen of the properties tab). If this option is activated, unauthenticated site visitors will be able to post new topic or comments after filling in a Captcha.
The silva.pas.openid package can be installed in order to provide authentication via OpenID. This authentication will be sufficient to let site visitors post on forums and topics.
Another option, anonymous posting, can be activated by site managers on the same screen as the unauthenticated posting. It will permit authenticated visitors to hide their names on the topic or comment they posted.
Notification
A site manager can, per forum or per topic, activate a subscription feature. If activated, this will allow visitors, after subscription, to receive notifications by email when a new comment is posted on a topic.
If you email is known (i.e. you filled it in in Silva, or it was provided by your OpenID provider), you will have the possibility to directly subscribe yourself to a topic when you post it, or to a topic when you post a comment in it.
Of course people can cancel their subscription when they wish to.
This feature is provided by silva.app.subscriptions. To have it, you need to enable subscriptions for the forum, just like you would do for other Silva content. For more information about the subscription feature, you can consult the Silva user documentation.
Credits
Many thanks to Bas Leeflang and the Bijvoet Center http://www.bijvoet-center.nl/ for the assignment to build the forum.
Thank you Mark James of http://www.famfamfam.com/ for the great icons, which we used in the forum views! And the theme of JForum for emoticons icons.
For Silva 2.2/2.3 the forum was refactored and vastly improved, with the generous help of the Schweizerischer Erdbebendienst (SED, or Swiss Seismological Service) and ETH Zurich: http://www.seismo.ethz.ch/
Code repository
You can find the code of this extension in Git: https://github.com/silvacms/Products.SilvaForum
License: New BSD