The Classic Forum

Prefacing Words

The Classic Forum is a forum project in the classical sense of the word "forum". This means a classic threaded view (not as it is in the lots of board systems today). The intention of this project is speed and lots of features (in regard to personalisation of the forum view). But the main point of view is simply performance.

Used Technoligy

The software is mainly written in C. Small pieces are written in Perl. It is based on a client-server architecture: a forum server holds all data in the RAM so that there is no need for the viewer programs to parse the data over and over again. The communication between viewer and server programs uses Unix Domain Sockets. You can use shared memory optionally, too.

Data Basis

The data of the Classic Forum will be saved in XML files. These will be load into the RAM at server start. The data will be written to disk periodically.

Features

General

The main feature of the Classic Forum is speed. It uses surprising few ressources and offers a lot of personality functions. A user can override nearly every configuration option in his private configuration. It is easily extensible und offers a nifty plugin interface.

Filtering Options

• Highlighting of poster names
• Blacklisting of poster names
• Highlighting of categories
• Blacklisting of categories
• Highlighting of own postings
• Server-site read-marks of read postings
• Filtering by date
• Dynamic filtering of the main view by defined criterias
• Scoring filter (similar to these used in usenet clients)

Design Options

• Use of alternative designs
• Use of own stylesheets (supplementary or exclusive)
• Use of XSLT stylesheets
• Configuration of the size of the input field
• Configuration of the actual posting color
• Configuration of the font size, font family and font color
• Configuration of the quoting color and the quoting characters

Functionality

• Use of a frameset
• Choose of a complete display, partitial dislay or no display of the thread tree in postings
• Setting of the target attribute for links
• Optionally disabling of signatures
• Setting of link tags with reasonable values
• Nifty administration view

Posting Options

• Initializing of the Name-, Email-, Homepage- and Image-field with standard values
• Predefine of a greeting, adoption and a signature
• Replacing of place holders like {$name} and {$vname}.
• Diverse text macros
• Testing of links for syntactical correctness
• Optionally disabling of quoting
• Direct redirect of the new posting after submit
• Warning at syntactical incorrect URIs
• Initializing of the "Preview" button

Technical Features

• Exchangeable authentification methods (default: HTTP authentification)
• Handling of the HTTP header If-Modified-since
• Correct setting of the HTTP header Last-Modified
• I18N - internationalized software

History of the Classic Forums

The forum project was started in November 2001. It was started because the project SELFHTML, a german documentation project for HTML, needed a faster forum. It only had a low-budget server and the used forum scripts were to expensive. So I thought about the failures of the previous forum and tried to avoid them.

Mailing-Liste

If you have questions or suggestions write an email to cjk@wwwtech.de. Please add [cforum] in the subject!

DOWNLOAD

Actual Version

The actual version of the forum is 3.4.11. It can be downloaded at http://wwwtech.de/cforum/download/cforum-3.4.11.tgz.

Download Archive

All versions of the Classic Forum can be downloaded at the download archive.

CVS Access

The Classic Forum uses Subversion. Reading access is given by the web viewer or with svn co http://wwwtech.de/svn/cforum/trunk/.