Future plans for RForum

It’s unclear to me from the trac site what the future plans are for
RForum. I have some personal projects that I’d like to work on (mainly
a forum-backed blog), and I’d really like to get my hands into some RoR
coding, but I’m hesitant to attach myself to such a young project that
has no clear vision (i.e., if the project is likely to have drastically
different goals that what I have in mind, then I’m probably better off
working with a more mature but inferior project, such as PhpBB or even
JForum). Is there any place (that I’ve missed) where there’s some
discussion or statement of what RForum wants to become? Will it someday
allow multiple layers of subforums and a rich set of access controls,
administrative features, and skins, or is it intended to be mainly
simple, lightweight, and elegant? Or is this all as-of-yet
undetermined?

The next release (0.2) will have:

  • mailing list support: the forum can be used as a web interface for
    reading and posting to any mailing list
  • multiple search backends (Odeum, SQL, MySQL fulltext, Lucene)

Features planned for later versions are:

  • file attachments (0.3)
  • Matt’s module system (0.3)
  • Rating system for posts (as a module, if possible)
  • source code highlighting (module)
  • access control

There is no concept of “skins”. The design is 100% based on CSS, so you
can make the forum look completely different simply by using another
stylesheet. To emphasize this point it might make sense to include an
alternative stylesheet in the distribution.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Andreas

Regarding administrative features: It is already possible to create/edit
forums, edit/delete/undelete/move posts/topics and block IP addresses of
authors in the web interface.

andreas wrote:

There is no concept of “skins”. The design is 100% based on CSS, so you
can make the forum look completely different simply by using another
stylesheet. To emphasize this point it might make sense to include an
alternative stylesheet in the distribution.

I would really like to see what you can do with an alternative
stylesheet because currently RForum doesn’t look nearly as good as the
PHP alternatives