Forum OpenACS Q&A: Setting up forums and attachments

Posted by Vinod Kurup on 05/18/03 05:11 PM

I'm trying to test forum attachments on OpenACS 4.6.3b1 and PG, but I can't figure out how to set it up.

I've mounted Forums at /forums, File-Storage at /file-storage and Attachments automatically gets installed at /attachments. But in order for Forums to present the 'Add an attachment' option, Attachments is supposed to be mounted underneath Forums.

I tried to mount another Attachments instance under forums, but Attachments is a singleton package. So then I unmounted it from the root and mounted it at /forums/attach. Now, Forums shows me the 'Add an attachment option', but it complains "Error: empty folder_id!". This seems to be a result of the fact that attachments_fs_root_folder_map is empty.

So, with this many errors, I'm thinking that I must be doing something wrong here. How do I setup Forums with Attachments?

Thanks

2: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/18/03 11:21 PM

I'll look into this - maybe attachments wasn't supposed to be a singleton after all! I think Peter diddled with these when he improved the APM ...

3: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 2)

Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on 05/19/03 12:14 AM

Vinod,

attachments is indeed NOT as singleton package. Instead it is designed to be mounted underneath the package instance that you would like to add attachments to. In you case you would have to mount attachments underneath the mounted forum instance. I can't remember if it requires a server restart. I belief it doesn't.

/Bart

4: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/19/03 02:48 AM

Yeah, but attachments is hosed I'm afraid. .LRN provides glue to tie it and forums together, and it appears Open Force never added the necessary stitching to let them work together outside the .LRN environment.

Chalk this one up to our concentrating hard on getting .LRN out the door last month, with most of our testing of OpenACS packages used in .LRN being done on .LRN test servers. This masked the dependency on .LRN.

I'm afraid this requires too much work to attempt to fix in 4.6.3. Perhaps 4.6.4 and certainly by 5.0. Sigh.

I've looked over attachments and forums again and have to say I'm not very happy with several elements. Attachments in particular depends on file storage and ought to be using the CR directly.

5: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Christof Spitz on 05/19/03 05:02 PM

One more reason to stick to the bboard package instead (for the time being)? Attachments work fine there.

6: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/19/03 05:12 PM

If you need them, yes, perhaps. Be warned there won't be any migration scripts provided for bboard to forums (they work well enough, the main problem with bboard is that it is grossly inefficient in some ways.)

7: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/19/03 05:16 PM

Let me rephrase that ... if at some future point, some current user of bboards who wants to migrate to forums wants to write and provide migration scripts we would certainly include them. I just don't have any plans to write them, and at the moment cleaning up forums probaby falls on my plate (there will be forums->forums-cleaned-up upgrade scripts provided, of course.)

8: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Christof Spitz on 05/20/03 10:55 PM

Thanks for the warning. It would probably not be wise to ignore it

9: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Christof Spitz on 05/21/03 01:39 PM

bboard again ... It seems this package has got a bad reputation and for some reason "forum" is better. I always thought bboard was one of the core "standard" packages of ACS at all, and, having a high version number, would be fairly well developed. That was probably a wrong judgement ...

In your OpenACS 5 announcements I found that one of the plans is to give more information on the status of the different packages. That would be very good! In the present state, when you are new to OpenACS (like me), it is even hard to find out what a certain package is good for.

10: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/21/03 05:34 PM

You are absolutely right. The reason we haven't rated or provided good status on packages is merely one of resources. Our project's growing, though, and as more and more people become involved we hope to be able to act more and more professionally.

bboard's disliked because its datamodel is horrific and the code that supports it contains some serious kludges that border on abuse of the object model. It was one of the first ACS 4.0 packages written, when the object model design was new and ArsDigita programmers were struggling to figure out the best way to write packages using it. Almost by definition the first couple of packages written using the new object datamodel were destined to be relatively poorly written.

11: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 9)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 05/26/03 02:49 AM

When aD first released ACS 4.0, many of the packages for it were also arbitrarily assigned a 4.0 version number, even though they were in fact mostly entirely new, and should have been version 1.0 (or even 0.9 or whatever, for that matter). Thus high version numbers for those old packages don't signify much of anything.

12: Re: Setting up forums and attachments (response to 1)

Posted by Amit Kr. Singh on 07/29/03 04:22 PM

I don't know weather this thread is still applicable. I was able to configure the same in 4.6.2.

http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=72802