OpenForum v0.8 (beta) is now available on CodePlex. Special thanks to Gunnar Peipman for the nice write-up on his blog, and also to Scott Hanselman for tweeting about it.
This 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 the forum (using Lucene.net). Also, the bin download now includes “view templetes”. This should give developers who want to change the actual html structure a big head start.
The plan for the next release is to provide a better default UI and a few other basic forum features. If there is anything you would like to see added, please let me know. Thanks to everyone who already provided feedback about how to make OpenForum even better.
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.”
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…
