Forum

The forum is the hub's message board. Discussions are organised into sections, which hold categories, which hold threads; a thread is an opening post and the replies to it. The site-wide forum lives at /forum. This chapter covers the administrator's side; the Hub users book covers reading and posting.

Whether your hub needs it

The forum is for the conversation that has no single right answer: a proposal being argued over, a shared problem nobody has solved yet, the running chatter of a working group. It is the only one of the hub's discussion components with a real hierarchy, so it is the one that scales past a few dozen threads without becoming a heap.

The typical case: two labs on the hub are agreeing on a file format. That is not a question with an answer — it is three weeks of back-and-forth that needs to stay in one place and be readable afterwards by someone who joins in week two.

Against its siblings:

• Better than Answers at anything ongoing, because threads have depth, categories, attachments, and per-section permissions. Worse at questions: no reply is ever marked as the answer, so a reader has to read the whole thread to find out how it came out, and a question asked in a busy category slides off the front page unanswered.
• Better than the Wiki at the argument; worse at the conclusion, because nothing here produces a single current version of anything. Pairs well with the wiki inside a group: argue in the forum, record the outcome on a wiki page.
• Where a hub's real unit of organisation is the group, the site-wide forum at /forum is usually the one that stays empty while the per-group forums fill up. Look at your groups before you spend an afternoon building sections nobody will read.

What it is not: it is not a mailing list, and it does not chase anyone. The site forum has no notifications of its own; per-member email notifications exist only in group forums, through the Groups - Forum plugin. A site-wide forum on a hub whose members do not visit daily will be posted to and never replied to.

Before you build anything here, decide whether you want a site forum at all. If your hub already runs Answers for questions and groups for team talk, a third place to post is a third place to go unread.

Open it in the administrator interface under Components > Forum. Three sub-menu links sit at the top left — Sections, Categories, and Threads — one for each level of the hierarchy.

Scope

Every section, category, and post carries a Scope and a Scope ID. Together they say which forum the record belongs to: site with an ID of 0 is the site-wide forum, group with a group's ID number is that group's forum, course with a course ID is a course's forum. All of them share the same tables and the same three administrator screens, so the lists you see here contain every forum on the hub, not only the site one. The Scope filter on each screen narrows the list to one forum; the site forum is listed as (none).

Sections

The Sections screen lists ID, Title, State, Access, Scope, and the number of Categories in the section. Click a column heading to sort by it, click again to reverse the order. Click the category count to jump to that section's categories.

Filter the list with the search box (matched against titles; press Go, or Clear to reset), the Scope, State, and Access menus.

The toolbar offers Options, Publish, Unpublish, New, Delete, and Help.

Categories

The Categories screen lists ID, Title, State, Access, Scope, Threads, and Posts. The thread and post counts link to the Threads screen filtered to that category.

Filter by Scope; once a scope is chosen a Section menu appears, and State and Access menus are always present. This screen has no search box. The toolbar is the same as the Sections screen.

Threads

The Threads screen lists thread-starting posts: ID, Title, State, Sticky, Access, Scope, Creator, and Created. Click a title to open the thread's posts. Click the Sticky icon to pin or unpin a thread — sticky threads sort to the top of a category regardless of age.

Filter by Scope, then Section, then Category, plus State and Access.

Opening a thread shows the posts it contains — ID, Title, State, Scope, Creator, Created — with a Category filter and the same State and Access filters. A post saved without a title is given one built from the first 70 characters of its text.

Setting up the site forum

Building the two labs of the example above a place to work, end to end. This is the only setup task the component asks of a manager; everything after it is members posting.

1. Go to Components > Forum > Sections and press New. Give it a Title — one section is enough to start with; sections are the top level and a hub with three threads does not need three of them. Leave Scope at site and Scope ID at 0. Set State to Published and choose an Access level. Save & Close.
2. Go to Categories and press New. Pick your section from the Section menu, give the category a Title and a Description — the description is the only place you get to say what belongs in here, and it is shown under the title on the site, so use it. Save & Close.
3. Go back to Sections and click the section's category count to check the category landed in the right place.
4. Open Options and set Threading to Nested threads unless you want flat threads. See the warning below: the shipped value is neither choice, and the effect is flat.
5. Visit /forum as a member would and confirm the section and category are visible at the access level you set.

Everything in steps 1 to 4 is reversible: unpublish a section and its categories vanish from the site with their content intact. What is not reversible is Delete, which is why the warning below matters more than anything else on this page.

Add categories as topics actually appear, not in advance. Empty categories make a forum look abandoned, and a member faced with eight of them posts in the wrong one.

Editing a section

Field	Notes
Scope	Which kind of forum the section belongs to: site, group, or course. New sections default to site.
Scope ID	The ID of the group or course. 0 for the site forum.
Title	Required.
Alias	The URL segment. Left blank, it is generated from the title in lowercase with hyphens for spaces.
State	Unpublished, Published, or Trashed. Only published sections appear on the site.
Access	The viewing level a visitor needs.

The panel beside the form shows the Creator and Created date. If you have the component's Admin permission, a Rules fieldset at the foot of the form sets permissions for this one section.

Press Save to stay on the form, Save & Close to return to the list, or Cancel.

Editing a category

Field	Notes
Scope, Scope ID	As above, but overwritten with the parent section's values on save.
Section	Required. Sections are grouped by scope in the menu, with the site forum shown as [ site ]. Saving with no valid section fails with "Section was not specified or does not exist."
Title	Required.
Alias	As above.
Description	A line or two shown under the category title on the site.
Lock Category (no new posts)	Locked categories accept no new threads. Existing content stays readable.
State	Unpublished, Published, or Trashed.
Access	The viewing level a visitor needs.

The side panel shows the creator and creation date, and the modifier and modification date once the category has been edited. This screen's toolbar offers Save & Close and Cancel only; unlike the section and post forms it has no Save button that keeps you on the form.

Editing a post

The same form edits a thread-starting post and a reply; which fields appear depends on which it is.

Field	Notes
Scope, Scope ID	Overwritten with the parent category's values on save.
Object ID	An optional ID linking the post to another item on the hub.
Category	Thread starters only. Required; the menu nests categories under their sections.
Parent	Replies only. Which post in the thread this one answers.
Title	Optional. Left blank, it is built from the first 70 characters of the post.
Comments	Required. The body of the post.
Your tags	Thread starters only.
File, Description	One attachment per post. Uploading a new file replaces the current one. Existing attachments are listed above with a delete link.
Post Anonymously	Hides the author's name on the site.
Make discussion sticky	Thread starters only.
State	Unpublished, Published, or Trashed. A fourth state, reported, is set when a member reports the post as abusive; the post then shows a warning in place of its text on the site.
Access	The viewing level a visitor needs.

The toolbar has Save, Save & Close, Cancel, and Help.

Options

The Options button opens the component-wide settings: where uploaded files are stored, which forums feed the site's discussion listings, whether members may post anonymously, whether threads are flat or nested, and how deep nesting may go. Every option is listed with its values in the configuration reference.

Of the rest, the one to think about is whether members may post anonymously, which ships enabled. Anonymous posting hides the name on the site but not in the database — you can still see the author on the post's edit form — and on a small hub where everyone knows everyone it mostly invites the kind of post you will later have to unpublish. Turning it off is worth considering unless you have a reason to keep it, such as a forum for reporting problems with a colleague's tool. Changing the setting does not retrospectively reveal anyone: posts already made anonymously stay anonymous.

Permissions

The Permissions tab of Options controls who may access, administer, and manage the component, and who may create, delete, edit, change the state of, and edit their own entries. Alongside the general actions, the component defines separate create, delete, edit, edit-state, and edit-own actions for each level — Section, Category, Thread, and Comment — so a group can be allowed to start threads without being allowed to add categories. Permissions can also be set on an individual section, category, or thread through the Rules fieldset on its edit form, and the site-facing forum honours those: a member with the section create permission gets a New Section form on the forum's home page.

Group and course forums

A group's forum is provided by the Groups - Forum plugin, which reuses these models and tables with a scope of group. Its plugin settings set the default access level for the tab and the display limit; a group's own managers set threading, default sort order, and anonymous posting from the forum's Settings page inside the group. Group forums also offer per-member email notifications, described in Group forum.

API

The forum exposes endpoints for listing sections, categories, and threads, reading a single thread, creating threads and posts, and managing a member's category subscriptions. See the API reference.