I’ve created a Wordpress Theme that turns Wordpress into a pretty powerful forum! You can see it in action here (please check it out and tell me what you think!) It is currently using my TDO Mini Forms plugin to allow visitors start new topics without being turned into full-blown authors.

It works by treating Categories as Forums and treating Posts with omments as Topics. I’ve also built in a number of features to the theme:

• 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)
• 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)

I also did some special integration with two popular plugins:

• Filosofo’s WordPress Gravatar Plugin so that users automatically have user-icons thanks to Gravatars.
• Paged Comments. With Paged comments, I’ve done quite a bit of integration. If you enable this plugin with the theme, essentially the blog post (which is the first post in a topic) appears only on the first page of comments, not on every page of comments as if it was a blog. And it handles ascending and descending order too.

Why use Wordpress as a Forum instead of a Blogging Platform? Because Wordpress is pretty darn powerful and it’s more like a full CMS geared towards blogging. It has comment spam protection, a huge array of powerful plugins, tagging, RSS feeds and really easy to extend and customise. Why not use Wordpress as a Forum?

On the demo forum, with the aid of some plugins I’ve added OpenID support, email subscriptions for new topics and comments, and it pulls from my own blog the latest news about TDO Mini Forms (TDOMF) as new topics.

It uses TDOMF to supply the user posting forms for starting new topics but by it’s flexibility you can also have moderated forums and special custom posting forms. For example I’ve added a TDOMF support form that turns a forum/category it into a bug tracker and help request forum.

One of the things I was unable to do was to create a real private members-only forum as I couldn’t find a plugin that would lock down posts in a category. disclose-secret promises privacy settings for categories in a future version.

The other thing I wasn’t sure how to do was integrate the theme into an existing blog so that you could simply “add” a forum to your existing blog, but that’s a lot more tricky.

But a big warning, I’m not a web designer so the theme itself is not very pretty. I mostly styled it for spacing and layout. It’s pretty thin so it should be easy enough to turn into your own look and feel. It is still a work in progress and I plan to add some more features to it, in the coming days (weeks/months/whenever):

• Sticky Posts
• XHTML compliant
• An admin screen for the configuration options
• A page template that allows user posting (so that the theme is genuinely standalone and doesn’t require TDOMF)

The other interesting thing I could do is spin off the “features” I’d add to the theme as seperate plugins: Quoting Comments and Posts, AJAX Comment Preview, Comment Quicktags, Post and Comment RSS Feed, etc. For another rain day I think.

It was originally just a thought-exercise, inspired by these non-blog uses of Wordpress: Prologue (a twitter clone) and WP-Contact Manager (an online address book). Each of theses is built using a theme, no changes to Wordpress. But the little project consumed me a bit and now I’m seriously considering it as a replacement for my existing forum.

If your interested in getting your hands on the theme or knowing more about how I did anything, please feel free to post on the demo forum or drop a comment below!

It is an Enchanted Device Generator for Ars Magica (4th Edition). It’s built using PHP and Sajax which is a free AJAX toolkit.

It’s been quite an enlightening experiment. The buzz and hype generated around AJAX is quite something, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I started with an idea, a simple script that takes in a few values and does some calculations and presents the result to the user. But, I wanted the user to be able to tweak the values and see the results immediately. That sounds like something AJAX is perfect for.

So the first thing I learnt as I started building the script and using Sajax was JavaScript. I used to avoid JavaScript like the plague. I know you can do some funky stuff but in my past experience, JavaScript slows down the user experience and can be very flaky across browsers. Still, what I learned was that I could have easily built my script using just JavaScript.

Yet AJAX would allow me to offload work from the browser to the server. Great, I thought, now I can do the calculations using PHP and just do all the text stuff using JavaScript. The snag I came across was that Sajax treated PHP as an intermediary interface. For example global variables defined in PHP were not accessible when a PHP function was called from JavaScript. Not alone that, only strings could be passed back from PHP. Rich types like arrays are not currently possible. I solved this by doing the calculations once, putting all the values in a string and then passing that string around when calling other PHP functions through Sajax.

It works now and I’m happy enough. One thing I noticed while I was working away, is that I started thinking about the script more as a User Interface than a webpage. I guess that’s what the hype is really about. All this Web 2.0 silliness. On the other hand, I found it hard to separate the HTML and CSS code and design from the JavaScript and PHP coding. If you look at the script, it’s very bare. I guess if you treat it like a UI, you’d do your “prototype” first and then add code.

Though I’ve come to love PHP, I have my reservations. While it’s a powerful feature to mix html and code, it always bugged me that you can write code that essentially modifies and generates code (in this case HTML, CSS and JavaScript). I guess I’m old fart but that use to be a no-no in the land of C and ASM (a land I know better than I want). It makes the code unreadable and un-maintainable. And I think often PHP is a little unreadable unless you have a syntax-aware editor or layout your code very well. I’m one of those ‘hardened programmers’ that prefer basic text editors over IDEs (though I’ve been softened lately by JEdit). Still the idea of using AJAX to create entire UI-like interfaces is a little scary. You really need to think about design of your code to make it maintainable. Still, I like the potential of AJAX and the possible applications on webpage. On the other hand for small ideas, I could just use some JavaScript.