FrontForum Module

Description

Uses forum discussions to create news system (with comments) to put on the pages. Also can create RSS feeds.

In more details - each new forum thread from selected forum categories is used to create new news item (first post makes the body). Several parameters allow customization.

If RSS feed is created a link will also be put into the document head (feed info should appear in browsers automatically) and below the news items.

Attributes

attribute required allowed values default description
category yes semicolon-separated integers none numerical IDs of the forum categories (look at the URL address); multiple categories can be used to create news
feed no alphanumeric none if present - RSS feed will be created with the filename equal to its value
feedTitle no string "sitename feed" title of the feed
limit no number 20 how many items should be displayed
offset no number 0 how many items to omit from the beginning?
fixRelativeLinks no true none fixes links for forum posts if you're using categories from external forums, e.g. Wikidot News / Changelog etc.

Category IDs can be found when looking at the URL address of the page which lists the threads in the category. It looks like this:

http://community.wikidot.com/forum/c-12/bugs-and-problems

So in this case the category ID is 12.

Item format

A custom format for displaying news items can be chosen. To specify a custom format one should use module invocation:

[[module FrontForum category="..."]]
<custom format>
[[/module]]

where the inner <custom format> element is any block of text following the wiki-syntax, where special variables can be used:

variable aliases description
%%title%% title of the news item
%%linked_title%% %%title_linked%% title of the news item linking to the original forum thread
%%link%% URL pointing to the original forum thread
%%author%% prints author of the thread
%%date%% prints posting date
%%date|format%% prints posting date with a custom format. Most tokens from php's strftime are accepted. You may find the howto contributed by community useful.
%%comments%% number of comments = number of threads posts - 1
%%category%% forum category where the thread belongs (linked)
%%description%% %%short%%, %%summary%% short summary of the item
%%content%% %%text%%, %%long%%, %%body%% full content of the item (post)

The default format is:

+ %%linked_title%%

by %%author%% %%date|%O ago (%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z)%%

%%content%%

%%comments%% | category: %%category%%

Examples

The news from the main Wikidot site use the following code to produce both the news on the main site and a feed:

[[module FrontForum category="8" feed="news" feedTitle="Wikidot site news"]]
++ %%linked_title%%

%%date|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)%%

%%content%%

%%comments%% | category: %%category%%
[[/module]]

You should change the category and feedTitle parameters of course to match your own Site.