WP-Forum
I previously had downloaded this plugin and quickly decided it was not for me! To stay on the positive side I’ll only say this: You’ll really appreciate the broad capabilities of free forum engines like PHPBB after using this plugin. That being said…My buddy Zeblue wanted something simple to add on to his WP blog to give “general” forum functionality to himself and his readers. WP-Forum is one of the higher ranked plugins in the WP plugin database, so I recommended him to use it. Zeblue is by no means an idiot, and approached me with some legitimate problems any user would experience in installing this plugin. My biggest problem with this plugin is the “packaging.” First of all I hate plugins that aren’t an “All-in-One” install (just a personal nag), so the fact that you have to create an additional page manually, and enter a tag manually is annoying. Nextly, The “readme.txt” file needs to be updated immediately (as well as the website). It actually has the wrong tag specified for displaying recent posts in the sidebar. The tag reads as follows:
Code from the website:
<?php latest_activity(numbers_to_show); ?>
Code from the readme.txt:
<?php forum_latest_acivity(numbers_to_show); ?>
And finally what the code should be (or at least what worked for me; note the GREEN text where I made corrections):
<?php forum_latest_activity(numbers_to_show); ?>
The second problem was the placement of the tag. This could have just been something isolated to me, but I’d like to think of myself as somewhat skilled in web development and problem solving. Even after I corrected the mistakes in the tag I could not get the data to display within the sidebar, nor was anything displaying in the pages source. Only after moving the tag outside of the <ul> in the sidebar did it finally display. I tried this on 2 seperate WP installations, met with the same results. Has anyone else experienced this as well,or did I just troubleshoot something completely random.
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[...] Zeblue on Mar.03, 2009, under Website Related So, some time last night, Joseph got my sidebar stuff to function. Meaning that now new forum posts will display on the front page [...]