For Olympus! -livejournal

Discuss features as they are added to the new version. Give us your feedback. Don't post bug reports, feature requests, support questions or suggestions here.
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Discuss features as they are added to the new version. Give us your feedback. Don't post bug reports, feature requests, support questions or suggestions here. Feature requests are closed.
Roberdin
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by Roberdin »

phpBB is designed specifically as a forum system. Happy now? :P
Rob

vph
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by vph »

Well, this topic is related to a plea I posted earlier in this forum, in which I kinda put phpBB and drupal up for a comparison.

The point is time changes and our conception of things ought to change to. Note that originally it wasn't called a "forum" software, it was called "a bulletin board" -- drawing analogy with a physical bulletin board, where people put up a message to announce something. Today, these kinds of things are called "forums" (which is a more "advanced" notion than a bulletin board)-- a place where people gather and exchange dynamically.

But this picture is already changing. Is there a conceptual difference between a collection of blogs (such as slashdot.org) and a forum ? While in different applications, each has its own advantages, but the difference is getting smaller and smaller. If you think about it, I am confident you'd think this makes sense. Building communities is what this is all about, not a technical definition of what forums, blogs, portals are.

The question is should phpBB move toward that direction?

Only you can answer that question. However, I can share a thought. Let's go back to drupal vs phpBB again. I think both of these two systems are very well executed. They both try to provide a solution to build communities, but in very different manners. Drupal starts from the conceptual top down approach. They define communities as a polymorphic structure, that could be realized in many ways: forums, blogs, collaborations/books, syndications, etc. The result is that they produced a darn-good piece that can be realized in many ways. PhpBB on the other hand picks -- perhaps -- the most popular aspect of what it means to be a community, namely a forum, and produces something very efficient.

So, on one hand you have an abstract system in which communities can be realized in many ways. The minus is in each way it is not as efficient and effective as a specialized system. That's the price for polymorphism. On the other hand, you have a system that is very specialized and very efficient and effective at what it does, but unfortunately, is not general enough so that a community is not easily realized in another forum.

That is a comparison. Both of these systems as far as I'm concerned have achieved what they were set out to do, with some small additions, that near-future releases will easily take of. Now, the point is this: when you accomplish what you set out to do, do you stop there ? Did microsoft stop at selling OS's ? Did amazon stop at selling books? The answer is NO.

Drupal now has a very general system, they will and in fact are going your way, i.e making great modules, one of which would be a great forum module. If you haven't already, please try it out, and ask yourself if Drupal has a great forum (like phpBB), what will people think of it.

In some way, you have no choice.

Software changes with time. Technicality changes with time. But the idea stays. The big picture stays.

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stubbers
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by stubbers »

VPH your plea was posted earlier in this forum, and it was answered... This is forum software, it's pointless arguing about this, the phpBB team has probably taken it into consideration and these posts only annoy people who know very well that your post has already been answered.

The question is not should phpBB move toward that direction, at least that's not for use to ask... It's up to the phpBB group whether they want to create a Website In A Box or if they want to stick to forums...

It's not up to us what the hell the phpbb team do... I just wish the rest of this community would get that through their thick skulls, and stop acting like prawn sandwiches (sorry dan)...

blobber
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by blobber »

Apart from that, vph has composed a very nice and objective posting, while I don't necessarily share the idea that it might be good to add all sorts of things to a forum, vph's latter postings was certainly refreshing to read, no trolling and annoyance that I could tell.

This was even almost as refreshing as watching phpBB group members NOT locking controversial threads ;-)

Wert
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by Wert »

blobber wrote:
This was even almost as refreshing as watching phpBB group members NOT locking controversial threads ;-)
Um, this isn't controversial. Paul has already stated we're not going to do it.

Of course if someone wants to create a mod for this, we aren't exactly standing in their way.
Need good web hosting? I recommend Hostrocket.

gLiTcH_
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by gLiTcH_ »

A blogging feature will most probably not be used by all admins anyways. However, the good news is, is that a Blog MOD is currently in development and the developer pointed out that when Olympus is out of beta, he/she will make an olympus version of that Blog MOD. Check it out on the site below.
[Removed]

Thats the beauty of MODs ;)
Last edited by Graham on Wed Jul 06, 2005 5:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: De-spammified - not relevant to the discussion

newest
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by newest »

Thank you.. boys..
I just want to know your thoughts
And i wanted that phpbb team heard me..

i just could not understand the difference between my bloggs and my topics.. i just want to have a feature in Olimpus that could help me to pack my topics in one forum.. (of course not all my topics).. it's just like as a sorting by nickname..
gLiTcH_ wrote: A blogging feature will most probably not be used by all admins anyways. However, the good news is, is that a Blog MOD is currently in development and the developer pointed out that when Olympus is out of beta, he/she will make an olympus version of that Blog MOD. Check it out on the site below.
[Removed]

Thats the beauty of MODs ;)
good news :P

PS.. excuse me for my english..

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cyberCrank
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by cyberCrank »

grrrlromeo wrote: It's all in how you use it.
We have "blogged" on phpBB boards at work for years, i.e, used as a blog (simply logging restricted topics like a technical diary for others to "see" with other forums and topics used "normally") and blogged via a forum even before "blogging" became popular as such on the internet. And we blogged messages on bulletin boards decades ago to "share" info of various sorts. The function is simple with minor restrictions added. IMO there is a fine line between them and indeed depends on how they are configured and how it is used and how one or a delimited team uses the features of a site. A disciplined team can get a lot of mileage out of phpBB as it is in 2.0.*. However, the newer features in 3.0 (if they remain) will make this configuration even simpler to facilitate IMO with the Permissions structure as it is now for each and every user, group, and forum. So IMO it is not so much what you call something or its name, as it it how it is used or can be used. So I have to agree, and sometimes these things are easily done, but may take some "nonlinear" thinking without being biased by our "colored glasses" of experience, which can block or skew our "vision" sometimes... ;)

iowamf
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal (Drupal vs phpBB)

Post by iowamf »

w/ respect to Drupal vs phpBB ...

I've been using Drupal for ~8 months and phpBB for about 5 days - so I'm no expert in either.

However, Drupal's forums are awful - it's mostly a blogging tool (few:many).

phpBB's forums are very good - its a great many:many tool.

I'm taking over another web site that use IPB and their forums are very busy - I very much wanted to use drupal ... but I think the users would go crazy with Drupal's forums - that is leading me towards phpBB.

I noticed the BlogMod and ezPortal Mod - I'm hoping that adding those two to phpBB will get me a great forum, the ability to enable a few prolific posters with their own blog and a home page that looks like a portal all within one "tool" to accomplish what I wanted to do with Drupal (comments about this idea will be greatly appreciated!).

darkain
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Re: For Olympus! -livejournal

Post by darkain »

One feature from LiveJournal I personally would LOVE to see implemented (getting back on topic for a second) is the OpenID user authentication system. One current problem with having dozens of web sites on the web, each with their own individual installation of phpBB, is that you have to go and sign up on ALL of them, and this is annoying and time consuming. Using OpenID, we could create a centralized database of user logins that would be applicable to ALL installations of phpBB accross the web, as well as allowing users from Blogs such as LiveJournal log in and post comments.

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