Download it now!
This graphically simple theme turns your WordPress Blog into a Forum. Categories are treated as individual Forums and a Post (with it’s comments) is treated as a Topic (aka thread). It has a number of powerful features built in such as listing posts on the front page, not by latest date, but by last commented on date. See the full list of features after the cut (or just below).
Version 3 is tested for compatibility with WordPress 2.5 and the display of individual topics is tweaked to be more forum like
Check out the demo or the forums to see it in action!
Features
- Simple layout easy to modify and customize
- Lists posts by date of last comment (instead of published date) (included as a page template)
- Unread topics are highlighted and can be used to filter posts list (included as a page template)
- A hierarchical Forum list (included as a page template)
- AJAX Comment Preview (can be turned off)
- Comment QuickTags (can be turned off)
- Gravatars for posters and commenter’s (can be turned off)
- Forum-looking Layout
- Pages and Categories can be used as Tabs (configurable)
- RSS 2.0 Feed of forum posts (can optionally be included in the theme or replace the main post RSS feed link)
- Posts can be made “sticky”
- Can set different URLs to create posts for different categories
- Hide categories from the forum list
- Theme Options page within WordPress Admin UI
- Custom Posting Template
- And all for free!
Installation
Download the tdo-forum.2.zip file and unzip the contents to `/path_to_wordpress/wp-content/themes/tdo-forum`. Now login as admin and go to Presentation and select the TDO Forum theme. Once enabled you’ll see a “Theme Options” menu added under presentation. From here you can set the options for the theme (like disabling quicktags and comment previews, gravatars, RSS feeds etc.)
Configuration
By default, the front page of theme shows three tabs: latest, unread and forums. Theses are provided by default for demonstration. You can turn off these tabs from the Theme Options menu avaliable to admins.
The Theme Options menu allows you to set what categories to not use as Forums in the theme, chose what Pages and/or Forums to use as Tabs and to set a URL for users to post. By default this links to the write menu but this is not avaliable to all users (such as subscribers).
To give you more control of the theme, there are four page templates you can use. To use a page template, create a new page and then select the page template from the sidebar. The four page templates are Forum Index (displays the categories as a hierarchy forum list), Latest Topics (lists posts by their last commented on date), Unread Topics (lists posts unread by the current user) and Submit Topic (allows users to start a new topic). You can then use the Theme Options menu to set them as tabs, in the order you want with any other pages.
I’ve also built-in some support for the paged-comments plugin which displays many comments on separate pages. When you enable this plugin, the original post will only appear on the first page, so that the subsequent pages just show comments. You do not need to have this plugin.
Using the “Submit Topic” Page Template
The Submit Topic Template allows users (including non-registered) users to start a new topic. It picks up settings from the Theme Options and Comment settings. So if you allow only logged in users to comment, only logged in users can start a new topic too.
In it’s default mode, it’ll display a list of forums that the user can select. They can select multiple or single forums. To change this, check page-submit-topic.php and the function tdof_category_select (defined in functions.php). This takes many arguments much like the built in wordpress drop-down category list.
You can also set what category to use in the URL of the page template. Just add "?cat=[id of category]" to the URL (if your using non-fancy permalinks it’ll be “&cat=[id of category]“). For example, if the URL for your submit topic page is:
http://yourblog.com/page/submit-topic/
Then you can tell it to only submit to category with Id 5 by using this URL:
http://yourblog.com/page/submit-topic/?cat=5
This template does not include preview, moderation, captchas, custom field support, multiple-form configuration, role-based access permissions, easy customisation, etc. For that, I’d recommend my plugin TDO Mini Forms which is explicitly designed to create forms to allow users to post to your WordPress blog.
TODO List
- Optimization (SQL queries) and performance (caching) improvements. I’m not sure if this is yet required.
- Page Template for stand-alone custom posting. My recommendation will always be to use TDO Mini Forms as it’s pretty powerful (moderation queues, widget created forms, multiple forms, tons of options) but it’s good to make the theme totally stand-alone, in need of no plugins.
- Support “all pages” for tabs (currently you must specific what pages to use)
- Convert read posts in cookies to userdata when a user logs in
- Replace contents of WordPress Feed with Latest Feed. This requires a WP hook which is not avaliable and I don’t know if it will be ever.
- Allow admins to specify categories to include instead of exclude
- Update QuickTags so that it only supports the allowed tags for comments
- Favourite/Save Posts for User (might implement this as a seperate plugin)
- Comment number post thread in RSS feed
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do I get the latest updates on TDO Forum?
Probably the best place is the TDO Forum Tag on my website (the RSS Feed will be avaliable from here).
Where is the best place to get support for this theme?
You can use the my forums, drop a comment on my blog or you can post on WordPress.org’s Support Form
I want the custom posting form to do X?
Forget it. The Custom Posting Page Template is provided as is. If you need special modifications, please check out my TDO Mini Forms plugin. I’m not going to integrate the features of this plugin into the theme. It doesn’t make sense when you can just install the TDO Mini Forms plugin too!
Known Bugs
- I’ve hacked the_loop to get the theme to work properly. I’m sure this will introduce problems later.
- Some fiddling with timestamps of posts is not perfect. Sticky Posts have only the date they were made sticky printed on the Latest Topics list, not the last time they were commented on.
Version History
v1: 28 February 2008
- Initially version of theme with the basic set of features. Does not include a custom posting template and requires further optimization in the backend stuff.
v2: 10 March 2008
- Added “User Profiles”
- Added “Custom Posting Page Template”
- Added “Mark all topics read” button to the “Unread Topics” page template
v3: 08 April 2008
- WordPress 2.5 compatibility and also uses gravatars from WP2.5 if avaliable
- Tweaked individual topic layout (user info displayed on left)
Comments (19)
Hi. Is it possible for you to add as an option the Page as a Thread, instead of just the Post as a Thread? If it is, please add the option to have the pages as threads too, and not just the posts. I need both (the pages and the posts) and it would be really great if I could have a forum with both the pages and the posts appearing in it.
By the way, I am using the plugin Page Category Plus to assign categories to my pages. And when I open a category (forum), it says that there are no topics. But on the main page, it will say that there are five topics under that category. Maybe because my pages have been categorized, using the Page Category Plus plugin.
Why would you want to use pages as well as posts?
More than likely. The “loop” is seriously hacked in the theme so it’s probably not very compatible with other plugins.
Great Theme!
Will there be a new version soon?
Not in the short term. I’m currently busy with the next version of a WordPress plugin. There is at least one fix for the theme I should release, but I’m not sure I can add more. I’ve actually started to investigate alternative ways of doing a “forum” within WordPress and instead looking at plugins to do the heavy work.
Hello i install the plugin of tod mini form but there i cant found the option for to chose catagory where i wanna place my post so please help me or send me the way how i insert the catagory select option
Please mail me on
masoom.nf@gmail.com
i will be very thankful to u
Bye
Hello i install the plugin of tod mini form but there i cant found the option for to chose catagory where i wanna place my post so please help me or send me the way how i insert the catagory select option
Please mail me on
masoom.nf@gmail.com
i will be very thankful to u
Bye
Thanks for regards
I like the theme, thanks very much
david
can this plugin be used as a simple email form…as in contact?
I have a problem with the plugin. I got it to work fine and was testing it when I deleted a few posts, change the option from link to attachment to link to post on an image and now I can’t upload media to my site anymore. Please advise. Thank you, .c.
Hello,
It’s a really superb job done by you. But there is some problem i’ve faced with TDO from can you please help me ? If i want to grab IP address with custom field, how could it possible with TDO form?
Hello,
I just wrote a Turkish article about this theme to my blog. Thanks for this application.
Best regards.
Hello, Did you resolve the issue i’ve mentioned? I want to grab IP while TDO form has submitted. Is it possible with TDO form?
Thanks
G.S.Piash
I get the following error when I attempt to activate this plugin. A problem on the server side?
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 58368 bytes) in /vservers/letsgetdigit/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/tdo-mini-forms/include/tdomf-widget-classes.php on line 1811
I like the theme, thanks very much
when is the new version coming? thanks!
@Online Printing No new version is in the works I’m afraid.
this is a very nice plugin, I like it
but now I have a small porblem:
1. I want insert an image in the post (I use centent widget). I do not want use “upload file” that upload image as attachment.
2. the content widget only supply URL “link”. I want insert image from local folder.
3. is it possible add ‘insert” button to insert image, video, media…
Sorry for asking so stupid question, but I am a newbie, I don’t know PHP.
anyone can help me??
thanks in advance!!
Hello my website was suspended on the 20th. I think it has something to do with the miniform plugin. Now they want me to delete my entire site and start again. But if i do that and install the plugin again are they going to suspend it again. This is a question for the web hosts however they arent clear about anything. They wrote to me saying the problem was related to the link which has the miniform on. And that large scripts were running at the time, maybe the user was doin something with it. Im not sure, can you help with this as my website was suppose to go live on the 15th October.
hey man! help me please! i want get images on my TDOF but it dont work! i use $post->post_content or ob_get_contents() I saw nothing…please help me!
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