Forum OpenACS Development: Expanding Forum

1: Expanding Forum

Posted by Paul Owen on 09/08/03 12:50 PM

Hi,

I am a beginner in Openacs. Can anyone help me with this probelm? I want to build a Forum in my site, and I have installed the package. However, I want to have different forums for different departments, which means when I call up department A, only department A's messages are shown and they cant see B's messages. The departments are being dynamically added. I have stored the department details in my database. and each one is identified by a department_id. so when i call up a site for a particular department, i pass the department_id in the url. Do I have to hack in the code of Forum to achieve what i need? (I have thought of subsite, creating more than one instances of forums, but since department can be added dynamically, I don't think this work?)

Thanks

Paul

2: Re: Expanding Forum (response to 1)

Posted by Robert Locke on 09/08/03 01:36 PM

Hi Paul,

Are your departments also groups? If so, then granting "forum_read" for a forum only to its corresponding department should do the trick. Reading the code on the index page, it appears that the forum's posting policy should also be 'closed'. This should hide the forums which the department user does not have access to.

I would start by using the forums/permissions UI to achieve the desired result. You can then use the Tcl API to accomplish this in your code for managing departments (ie, create a closed forum, set the permissions, etc).

Sorry if this advice is too general, but I do hope it gets you going in the right direction!

Good luck...

3: Re: Expanding Forum (response to 1)

Posted by Simon Carstensen on 09/08/03 01:54 PM

Is there any reason why you can't just mount additional forum packages for each department? You could do that dynamically using the site_node Tcl API. Of course it depends on how many departments we're talking about, I have no idea how it'd scale on a larger scale.

What you're describing actually sounds a lot like dotLRN to me, which solves the problem by mounting a subsite for each department. Depending on the scope of the system you're building, there's always the option of using and perhaps extending dotLRN to some degree. Maybe total overkill, not sure :)

4: Re: Expanding Forum (response to 1)

Posted by Paul Owen on 09/08/03 02:49 PM

Thanks Robert and Simon for the replies. For the permission approach, it's not quite applicable to me, because my sites can be seen by general public. All I want to do is when someone reading department A site , then the forum messages for department B should not appeared. So it's more like classification into departments. (Sorry for I didn't make it clear enough)
And yes, it is like what dotLRN does I guess. There is no reason why I can't use it, just that I didn't know how to do it :) Anyway, maybe I should download dotLRN later and see what they do with it.

Paul

5: Re: Expanding Forum (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 09/09/03 02:43 AM

Creating a separate subsite per department should work fine, with each having its own forum package mounted underneath.

Who creates these departments dynamically? You? If so, it's not that hard to just do this manually via the site map.

If you want a push-one-button approach to adding new departments then you'll have to do some scripting on your own.

.LRN may or may not work for you, so downloading and playing is probably your best bet.