Dolphin 7.1 (Osho) - Forums (UPDATED)

Perhaps the most anticipated update in Dolphin 7.1 is finally ready for public scrutiny. Forums have been deliberately postponed to the latest stages of Osho development due to a number of questions that just refused to find easy answers. So, after a lot of discussion, research, pondering and, finally, development we came up with this...

General Improvements

1. Naturally, default Forums look and feel has been updated to match the new Dolphin template. Here's how it looks:

2. Search function now supports "fulltext search", which translates into a more "intelligent" searching functionality where the system wouldn't omit queries with incorrect words order for example, but would consider positions and would adjust results accordingly. 

3. Just like in BoonEx Forums, user thumbnails are now displayed in Topics and in Search Result pages.

4. Forums now can correctly handle usernames with spaces (thus potentially supporting Full Names).

5. Pagination added to My Topics, Flagged Topics, Subscribed Topics and Search Results.

6. Quick/Simple search function added to Forums Homepage.

7. Post Permalinks added. Now users can share links to specific posts.

8. Topic creation without the need to open some Forum page first. Just clicking a "New Topic" button would open a page for New Topic posting and a selection of destination forums. Looks like this...

Topic "Pagination"

Drumroll... ok, first some background and general info... 

Pagination in Forums isn't as obvious as it may seem. This feature can be implemented in a number of ways, which all have their own pros and cons, implications and complications. Until now we have been choosing to simply not support any pagination in Topics, but, naturally, this can't go on forever - some topics can grow to hundreds of posts and would be simply too big a load as a single page. 

Potential Solution #1 - Classic Paginate. The most obvious way would be to add a classic "pages" support, splitting every topic into a number of pages with an N number of posts on each. This is a commonly used method and it's also now implemented on all other "lists" within the Forums module. When it comes to pagination in Topics though, there're a few serious problems with this method:

- Subpages are neither user-friendly nor search-engine-firendly. I bet you have found yourself on "search engine versions" of different forums topics, where all posts are merged into one, with images and styles stripped. The reason is that good posts may end up "buried" too far away at pages that aren't even accessible from the first page of the topic. Say, when the topic has 100 pages - search engine or a user would have to open Page 20 first, and then hope to see a link to Page 25. This complicates so many things: often when we search for something and find a forum link in Google and open it only to realise that the text we look for isn't there (it may be relocated due to different pagination setting, edited posts, redirect from SEO to "user-friendly" version, etc.); links to specific pages may end up having different content; in order to keep faraway pages closer to the "surface" for search engines forums often cram in at least 10 of them on one page, making them too small to be convenient in mobile browsers; etc, etc.

- Classic pagination complicates design of the entire Forums functionality. Search results have to consider "pages", link to them correctly, and preferably group posts from one topic, making it difficult to show results snippets.  Page counts need to be added to topic lists, cluttering them and adding load. A slew of settings for pagination need to be added. It just goes on and on!

- Fluid nature of topic content (again, due to potential moderation changes and settings re-application) makes it very difficult to create permalinks to posts that properly stick to the proper page. Dolphin Forums now have post permalinks feature, which has become possible thanks to the method of "pagianation" we've chosen.

- And finally, even when/if it's all said and done, after, say 100 pages in one post you would HAVE to split the topic or risk making new posts being tucked away too far for search engines to care about, or people to reach to.

Potential Solution #2 - Dynamic Load. This is a fancy, modern way to load older posts - something you see at Facebook, Twitter and most of the newer "feeds". The page just loads additional posts as soon as you reach the end or click "load more button. It looks and works great for some things, but isn't very suitable for forums. Search engines won't find "hidden" parts, and users won't be able to use Page Search for what's not loaded yet. Long posts can also end up being too big for a browser to handle. 

Our Solution - Auto Split. So, we decided to implement what we believe is the most simple, straightforward, yet very "friendly" way to separate topics - we auto-split them.  Once the topics reaches more than 50 posts, a robot user called "Autopilot" will close current topic and will create a new one with "Title - Part 2" name. The new topic will have a link to the original topic as an opening post, and it will further split into "Title - Part 3" if it grows to over 50 posts, too. Nice and easy! No fuss in search system, plain and effective SEO structure (with friendly links), handy links and no buried pages. Such topics are a lot easier to manage and this method is often manually used by moderators of well-managed forums, so they won't confuse users. Here's how it looks:

As you may expect the new topic looks and works just like any other topic, plain and simple:

...note how old topics are getting locked and the new ones appear with "... - part 2" moniker.

We have played with new forums quite a bit now and can confidently assert that the new pagination, improved search, one-click access to "New Topic" and all the smaller improvements make Forums noticeably more user-friendly and should not brake anything when you upgrade from your existing Forums setup.

Voila! New Forums!  :)

UPDATE:

We have just added editable "stickies" - so that you can ad or remove "sticky" status for existing Topics; and improved attachments handling - pictures in attachments are now recognized as image files and open in browser instead of downloading as generic files.