Update - October 2005

As of early October 2005, we've refined (and scaled back) the set of requirements/features below and turned them into formal proposals for the Ploneboard PLIP tracker.

If you are interested in doing development work, or contributing funds to support Ploneboard development, please email Marshall Mayer.

Motivation

Plone aspires to be the definitive platform for building collaborative websites. Forums are an essential part of many community websites. Currently, the Plone platform lacks a truly outstanding forum product.

We believe that the most promising product in the Plone landscape right now is Ploneboard. Ploneboard's mission is to create "an easy to use web board. It utilizes the proven Plone user interface, and is made for easy integration into Plone sites. The target audience is businesses and developers wanting a discussion board in their Plone site."

As of this writing, Ploneboard 0.1 beta 1 has just been released. It's a great product already, with a lot of necessary features, but needs only a relatively small push to be "ready for prime time." It is our understanding that Alexander Limi of Plone Solutions has indicated that the Plone Solutions team (and perhaps others?) are eager to do some work on Ploneboard, but doesn't currently have any customers willing to pay to support the work.

Through this "social source" process, we hope to catalyze the Plone community to create a spec for a sufficiently-featured forum product as well as generate the financial and human resources necessary to realize the full potential of Ploneboard as the best-of-breed forum solution for Plone.

Our immediate goal is to help define a functional specification for Ploneboard 1.0 (a moderately-featured product), and catalyze the development of this product for completion by the end of 2005 (hopefully in sync with the release of Plone 2.2 and integrated with any new "community" workflows).

Our long-term goal is to help Ploneboard become the leading forum product for Plone, as well as evangelize the Plone platform, in part because it has easy-to-use and easy-to-implement community interactivity tools.

Proposal / Rough cut of feature requirements

NB: This section is now obsoleted by PLIPs at Plone.org, but may be useful for historical reflection.

Must-have features in core product (beyond what is already in 0.1beta1, in order of priority):

• Edit and delete your own conversation (initial post) and/or replies (assumes member status, delete only if there are no other replies linked to either, otherwise option to retract). Managers should have ability to delete posts.
• Add quotes from other posts/replies to your own reply.
• Add multiple images and/or multiple file attachments to any post (members only)
• Track read/unread status for all forum/conversation content by member.
• Add a portlet, showing all recent unread forums/conversations since last member login, organized by most recent forum, suborganized by most recent conversation.
• Make all recent conversations/most active recent conversations show up in "recent changes" portlet.  
• Ensure that all content is instantly cataloged (and undo is possible from the member level).
• Syndicate forums/conversations using whatever syndication method is included in Plone 2.1 as the default.
• Link each instance of a poster's username to their member profile page.
• Email notification of new comments per user, per conversation (subscribe button)
  
• Add a RAM Cache Manager to tweak for highest performance, based on all of the features above (and below, if possible).

  
  Preferences (administrative functions):

  For Ploneboard (default for all forums and users):

  • sort forum listings by date of creation (descending is only option, and the default), number of replies, most recent comment, most views (if implemented)
  • save user preferences by member for column sorts in each forum (pretty complicated)
  • default forum view mode (default = flat, option = nested)
  • default forum sort mode (default = oldest first, option = newest first)
  • allow member view mode (default = no)
  • allow member sort mode (default = no)
  • allow member signature file (default = no, if yes, must be a field in member preference)
  • default attachment/image file size maximum (default = 100K, option = open)

  For each forum:

  • forum sort mode (default = PB default, option = override)
  • forum view mode (default = PB default, option = override)
  • forum signature mode (default = PB default, option = override)

  For each member:

  • member forum sort mode (default = PB default, option = override)
  • member forum view mode (default = PB default, option = override)
  • member forum signature mode (default = PB default, option = override)

Nice-to-have features in core product (if they are not there yet, in order of priority):

• Permissions to share management or ownership of the forum content (by member or group).
• Listing of unviewed and unanswered posts (separately, member only)
• An option to add a special comment (sticky post/announcement) at the beginning of a forum about the purpose of the forum. This always appears at the top of any listing in that forum. Can only be added by someone who has permission to manager or own that forum.
• Next/Previous conversation links
• Add forum and/or conversation to Favorites
• Track number of views by forum and conversation
• "Jump To" feature to jump between forums
• Rich-text editing of comments with Kupu and/or Epoz.
  
• BBCode > HTML transform for users who are comfortable with BBCode.
• Post via email for registered users.
• Add ability to group forums by an attribute (call them forum groups), and display them separately as grouped forums on the main forum page (plus add a space for a graphic for the forum as a whole as well as each forum group).
  
  

Features that we believe could be accomplished as an add-on product/template, if the core product is architected to support add-on products (in order of priority):

• Migration utility, converting all CMFBoard content to Ploneboard.
• Other migrations possible based on migration mapping template (just a well documented data layer): standard mbox file, phpBB, vBulletin, Drupal forum
• Replace default Plone discussion tool with conversation tool.
• Once Plone (Zope?) decides on a time zone translation implementation (!), incorporate it in this solution. 

Implementation (TBD)

This section should ultimately include such details as:

Financial Resources - who can help pay for this work, and how much

Human Resources - how much work this will be, and who can do the work

Next steps

• Circulate this draft via Plone-users to:
• Solicit comments from interested parties
• Encourage folks who are interested in participating in development or funding to "raise their hands" and identify themselves.
• Brian Gershon will be talking to folks about this at the Plone Conference in Vienna.  (Say hi to him if you're there!)
• Develop a budget
• Solicit contributions (via Fundable.org?)
• Work with contributors to finalize the requirements
  
• Identify development team (hopefully Plone Solutions and friends!)
• Implement/test/release/enjoy ;-)
  

Who we are

Marshall Mayer is the founder of LiveModern, a community website that promotes affordable modernist architecture.  LiveModern has a large and active community forum, currently powered by CMFBoard.  Marshall has extensive experience with community-driven and open-source software development for the nonprofit sector. Email me with comments.

Jon Stahl is a Program Manager at ONE/Northwest, a nonprofit organization that provides online communications strategy and consulting services to environmental organizations in the Northwest US and British Columbia, Canada.  In the past 18 months, ONE/Northwest has implemented over 40 Plone-powered sites for its clients, and is keenly interested in helping Plone become the best-of-breed web platform for the NGO sector.