mwForum Readme
Contents
Introduction
mwForum is an open-source, Web-based discussion forum system.
mwForum is based on Perl CGI
scripts, uses a MySQL,
PostgreSQL or SQLite database and is compatible
with mod_perl 1.0 and 2.0
for optimal performance. mwForum's design goals are comfortable
operation and administration, stability, security and speed, a
professional and consistent look, and lean and clean code to make
customization easy.
Documentation
License
mwForum is Copyright © 1999-2015 Markus Wichitill.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software foundation; either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General
Public License for more details.
Website
The website is at http://www.mwforum.org/ (broken
link).
Support
Support is available from the support forum on the website
mentioned above. Please make sure to specify your software
products/versions and to clearly describe your problem when posting
in the support forum. Too many details are always preferable to too
few.
If you ask for help in the support forum and get that help,
please reply back. The main reason is that we need feedback on
whether the support was helpful, if and how the problem was fixed,
or whether you just gave up in frustration. Saying thanks can't
hurt either, but mainly we need the feedback. To only receive
silence after spending considerable amounts of time on trying to
help can be frustrating. General feedback about your and your
users' experience with the forum is appreciated, too.
Update News
To receive email notifications about new mwForum releases and
possible security issues, register an account in the support forum
and subscribe to the mwForum board in the Downloads category. To
receive news about addons, styles etc. you can also subscribe to
those download boards. Please note that you have to login to the
forum once a year to keep the subscriptions from expiring.
Features
This is an overview of the main features of mwForum, not a
complete list. Many features are optional, especially those that
impact performance.
- Forum
- Supports Perl CGI, mod_perl 1.x and 2.x
- Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite databases
- Highly configurable via online form
- Valid HTML5.
- Styling via CSS stylesheets, multiple user-selectable
styles
- Language modules, user-selectable
- Uses Unicode/UTF-8
- Private messages, with export
- Chat page
- Atom and RSS feeds
- Event logging with log browser
- Attachment list with image gallery mode
- Searching, optionally with fulltext index and/or Google
- Plugin interfaces: authen, authz, include, event, log, message
display
- Export/import between different mwForum installations
- Supports IPv6 addresses
- Boards
- Grouping by collapsible categories
- Read access: everybody, registered users, selected user
groups
- Write access: everybody, registered users, selected user
groups
- Moderated boards where only approved posts are visible
- Posting by unregistered users
- Archiving
- Topics
- Threaded or non-threaded
- Polls, with single or multiple votes
- Collapsible branches in threaded topics
- Moving and deleting of whole topics and topic branches
- Manual and automatic locking
- Expiration
- Merging
- Tags and icons
- Posts
- Post preview
- Editing, with optional time limitation
- Quoting in good old email/news style
- Additional post field for source code etc.
- Text snippet insertion
- File attachments
- Thumbnails resizing for attached images
- Reporting of rule-violating posts
- Post content rating with statistics
- Tracking of which posts are new/old in current session
- Tracking of which posts are unread/read independent of
session
- Notifications when words on watch list appear in new posts
- Notifications when users on watch list post new posts
- Overviews containing all new or unread posts, per topic, board
or for whole forum
- Markup [tags] with insertion buttons, predefined and
custom
- Manual and automatic linking of URLs
- Configurable :tags:
- Censored words
- Flood protection
- Video embedding
- Users
- Cookie-based and OpenID login
- Various captcha
- Click-through policy agreement
- User info pages with public profiles
- Configurable user profile fields
- Avatars, uploaded and gallery, automatic resizing, users can
disable display
- Signatures, short and simple or long incl. markup, users can
disable display
- Notifications for replies, messages, moderator actions
etc.
- Lists of newest, online and birthday users on main page
- Expiration, after x days absence and/or if never logged in
- User list for all users with public info
- User list for admins, can display and search all fields
- Ranks based on post count
- User titles and badges
- GeoIP country detection
- User groups, public and non-public, joinable or managed
- Birthdays
- Ignoring
- Banning
- Email
- SMTP, sendmail or mail transport
- RFC 2554 authentication
- OpenPGP encryption
- Bounce detection
- Instant and digest subscriptions of boards and topics
- Notifications for replies and private messages
- Registration can optionally require valid address
Contributing
Want to contribute?
- Find bugs and submit detailed bug reports
- Help other users in the support forum
- Create and update language modules
- Create plugins, addons, mods and styles
I'm not really interested in contributions to the core code,
because for this type of application, it's typically more work for
me to evaluate/integrate/test third-party code than to code the
respective features myself, and certainly less fun.
Plugin/modular/external features are welcome of course.
Make sure to skim Develop.html before
making substantial code changes. Of course you can always post code
patches in the support forum, even if they don't get integrated
into the main distribution.
Credits
- Markus Wichitill
- Author and maintainer.
- Philip Mak
- Author of Text::Flowed, long-time hosting of mwforum.org.
- Daði Örn Jónsson, Matthias Althaus, Tobias Jaeggi
- Testing, bug reports and feedback.
- The jQuery Team
- Authors of the jQuery
Javascript library. License: MIT.
- Dylan Verheul
- Author of the jQuery-autocomplete
Javascript library. License: MIT.
- Tango Desktop Project
- Creator of the Tango Icon
Library, used for button icons and smileys. License: Public
domain.
- OpenMoji
- Creator of the OpenMoji,
used for button icons and smileys. License: CC BY-SA
4.0
- Benjamin Franz
- Author of CGI::Minimal Perl
module, on which MwfCGI.pm is based. License: Artistic/GPL.
- Milivoj Ivkovic
- Author of Mail::Sendmail Perl
module, on which MwfSendmail.pm is based. License: "Do whatever you
want with it."