OpenForum - A Free Forum for MVC Applications
UPDATE: I’ve changed the links at the bottom. Hopefully that will resolve the issue that some people were having with downloading the source. I’m not sure why the original URLs worked for some people and not for others, but as my friend always reminds me, “If computers just worked, we’d all be out of a job.”
UPDATE: I’m happy to announce that OpenForum is now on CodePlex. Check it out here… http://openforum.codeplex.com/
One of the things that I really like about the MVC framework is that it offers some unique possibilities when it comes to third parties developing entire sub-systems that can easily be plugged into existing applications. Recently, I had some “down time” at my work and decided to take the opportunity to experiment with doing just that. Here are the results of that experiment. OpenForum is a forum that can easily be plugged into any MVC application with very little effort. In fact, there are only three steps to get OpenForum working with most MVC applications.
1. Add a reference to OpenForum.dll
2. Initialize OpenForum (via one line of code in the global.asax file)
3. Add an html link to OpenForum in your menu (optional)
Here’s a little screencast that I put together showing the process in greater detail.
This is defiantly still in it’s early infancy, but it’s far enough along that I wanted to put it out there and get some feedback from the community. Notable missing features include the ability to search the forum and a lack of support for any html in posts. The plan is to eventually put OpenForum up on CodePlex once things get a little further along. Until then, I’d really appreciate some community feedback. Here are some links to a few other tutorials on using some of the more advance features of OpenForum…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZAyVlvSyeU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko_98aig44M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9Td5CFu2g
And here are the links to the needed dll as well as a link to the source
Bin
Source
June 29th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Having problems with the file links in FF. Are they not up yet?
June 29th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I am interested in looking at how you are implementing this, but it seems your download links don’t work.
June 29th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I find this very intriguing as I have been traveling around talking about something very similar lately.
I created a simple CMS prototype very similar to what you have right now that provided CMS-style functionality right out of the box. The goal was to show how easy it would be to create lots of “Application Blocks” (e.g., CMS, forums, blog).
I hope you continue forward with us and I would love to talk with you about your future plans.
June 29th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Uhmm it appears the links only go to a blank page where are the files?
June 29th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Thank you for the heads up. I just tested it and it seemed to work fine for me (heh, spoken like a true developer). I have had a few others test and they also seemed to be able to download just fine. I’m looking into it right now though.
June 29th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
[...] to Vote[Del.icio.us] OpenForum - A Free Forum for MVC Applications (6/29/2009)Monday, June 29, 2009 from [...]
June 29th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
People, it’s real easy to fix those URLs yourself: it’s clear that the download URL is attached to the URL from this post, plus “/wp-content/” is usually a root folder when people use WordPress for their blogs.
So:
http://software.herbrandson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/openforum.zip
http://software.herbrandson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/openforum_source.zip
June 29th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
It’s only easy if you are a wp user.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I’ve updated the URL to be the full path. Hopefully that resolves the issue for everyone.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Very Nice!
June 30th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
This is a really great bit of code you’re gifting, thanks for all the work that went into this. If we find a bug are you interested in hearing about it?
June 30th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
@William - Feedback of any kind would be great appreciated! Feel free to report any bugs in the comments here.
June 30th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
[...] ASP.NET MVC – OpenForum – A Free Forum for MVC Applications – Tweeted by Elijah Manor [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Great work, I am more interested in how you did it then the actual application.
The simple setup is great!
My only concern is the “DynamicViewEngine”. Having all that html written by code very flexible.. Ideally, you should be able to get it up and running quickly like you do now, however I would want to be able to “copy in” a set of view html files, and change them as I needed.
I did see some posts where of people using embed resources but I can’t find the link at the moment.
July 4th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
[...] OpenForum - A Free Forum for MVC Applications [...]
July 7th, 2009 at 7:44 am
The “source” doesn’t seem to more than a default asp.net mvc project?
July 7th, 2009 at 8:31 am
@CarlH - I just downloaded it and I see a solution with 3 projects. One is the default mvc project, one is the OpenForum project, and one is a unit test project. Is that not what you see?
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 pm
This is great stuff. This solidifies the ability to create who vertical application modules that can be delivered , scripts, views and all! Great work pulling all of the pieces together. I would love to talk more with you about this approach.
July 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
@Eric - - Thanks for the kind words. I’m really glad you like it. You can post any questions/ideas/thoughts you have here, or on the discussion board at http://openforum.codeplex.com. Also, you can email me at (eric at herbrandson dot com).
July 23rd, 2009 at 8:10 am
@Mark - Thanks for the feedback. I’ve addressed the issue you raised in the latest build (available on codeplex). The release now includes the default “templates” (as .ascx files) that you can simply include in your project and start modifying. Let me know what you think.
July 28th, 2009 at 10:45 am
[...] latest release includes a few key missing features from my inital posting. Most important, there is now a wysiwyg editor for posts (using nicEdit) and the ability to search [...]
August 25th, 2009 at 5:45 am
Hey
Is there any chance we could get a video or some screenshots to look at the moderation features?
Thanks,
Andy
August 25th, 2009 at 7:38 am
In the current version, moderation is done via Sql Management Studio. A better moderation system is coming in a future version.
August 27th, 2009 at 5:34 am
I will certainly be using when that version comes around then
Also, in upcoming versions, will there be added support for multiple forum categories?
August 31st, 2009 at 8:24 am
Thank you for the feedback. Yes, multiple categories is also on the list of future features.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:50 pm
This is the best thing I have ever seen… Thank you for this great concept… Can you explain some basic steps to build something like this?
Anyway, thank you very much for building and giving out this tool…
Samir
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Thank you for the kind words. Feel free to grab the source code and see how it was built. If there are any specific questions you have, please don’t hesitate to ask.
January 6th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
It looks like not working with MVC 2 RC. It throws
Method not found: ‘System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage.get_Html()’.