Feedback on MessageBoardPlugin

Could you please show a few sceen dumps as part of the plugin description? The idea sounds good, but...

-- ThomasWeigert - 18 Jun 2004

Dear Thomas

The screen shots are in place. Sorry about the application language at the screen shots: they were captured from my real, production implementation. The plugin's original language is english, and you can customize it completely (to german, for example) if you want to.

The basic idea for this plugin was to create a place where anybody (even non-techies) could post messages as easyly as possible, and remove "old" or "expired" messages without human interference.

This way, even the company secretary can send messages telling people that this or that manager are travelling or that someone is late today, or anything simple as this.

If you think this plugin should or could do something you can use, please post your idea here. If its sounds good to me, I will implement it. Of course, patches are welcome.

-- LuisCamposDeCarvalho - 18 Jun 2004

Luis, it looks lovely, but doesn't it rather overlap with the CommentPlugin, that provides much of the same functionality? Also, it feels a bit un-twiki to be storing content in a database, but of course the performance will be much better for doing it that way (I'm an advocate of having the ability to store all content in a database if people so choose).

-- CrawfordCurrie - 18 Jun 2004

Thank you CrawfordCurrie.

The main difference between MessageBoardPlugin and CommentPlugin is the way they handle posted comments. While a CommentPlugin comment is something forever (I guess), MessageBoardPlugin messages have well determined due dates. This is very important for the administration folks at my company, and I think it could be for others too.

I'm using a database to store content because I need a lot more control about it than CommentPlugin needs. I need to remove a old message from the MessageBoardPlugin display without human interference. This is a major, mandatory requisite. The content being stored inside a database is just an undesirable side effect.

-- LuisCamposDeCarvalho - 18 Jun 2004

OK, I see. Well, an alternative - and much lighter-weight - approach might have been to format the comment entered by the CommentPlugin so it can be recognised by a cron script that removes expired comments from the topics. That would have left the content in the TWiki topic. Of course, if you already have a database, I guess the temptation is there to make use of it!

-- CrawfordCurrie - 19 Jun 2004

checked .zip into CVS MessageBoardPlugin

-- WillNorris - 24 Nov 2004

Hi, I've been trying to get this plugin to work. I had installed it and gotten it working previously on TWiki 4.0.4, but if I install it on 4.0.5 and enable it, it seems to cause a crash during settings processing...

Anyone got any suggestions? I posted a support question on it, was suggested I post here. If anyone is interested in looking into it the particulars are posted on the support web at MessageBoardPluginBug

This is a nice plugin, though I think I'll add a few configuration options, like it would be very nice to be able to specify when you insert into the page which table to pull the data out of so you can have multiple boards (or perhaps each message can just have an extra column for that, maybe nicer, then you COULD actually thread things if you were so inclined).

-- TodHarter - 15 Dec 2006

I think this plug in would be great. I wish it worked in TWiki-4.2.0

-- KerrySmith - 11 Mar 2008

It looks like the functionality of this plugin can be done on the TML level as a TWikiApplication. See TWikiDotNetForumAppAddOn as an example (with somewhat different purpose.)

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Mar 2008

I changed the ModificationPolicy of this extension from ContactAuthorFirst to PleaseFeelFreeToModify due to inactivity. Anyone please feel free to work on this extension.

-- PeterThoeny - 2012-12-03