Q: Does ProjectForum support tags like in Flickr etc.?

ProjectForum doesn't use tags, but has a very similar mechanism called "categories". You can find information about categories both in the user's guide, as well as the online help that is loaded as part of each new forum.

Version 5.6.2 - security/bug fix release.

We've just released CourseForum and ProjectForum version 5.6.2. This update addresses a security issue which can potentially affect some sites that use projects, and fixes a sporadic bug encountered by some IE users at the end of file uploads. See changelog.

Q: I upgraded to a new version, and now everything says it's archived... what's going on?

Most likely, the license you have doesn't cover the most recent version of the software. If this is the case, ProjectForum will revert to the free version, which archives all but one group. Once you provide a new license key that is valid for the version you're running, everything will go back to the way it was.

So before you upgrade, make sure that your license still covers the new version. Purchased licenses cover all versions released for one year from the time the license was bought. You can always check this by going into the "Site Administration" area; the first page will tell you when your license is valid until. And of course, if you're not sure, just ask us.

Tip: Co-existing with another web server.

At its heart, you can think of ProjectForum as just a web server, albeit a very special-purpose one. If you're already running a traditional web server (Apache, IIS, etc.) on the machine you'd like to run ProjectForum on, you might want to think about how the two will co-exist with each other.

It's worth noting that you normally don't have to worry about this. ProjectForum runs independently of your existing web server; it does not depend on it, nor any components (e.g. PHP, MySQL, etc.) that your web server may normally use. As well, by default ProjectForum runs on a different port (3455, vs. 80 for your web server) so you shouldn't have conflicts there.

What if you want them both to run on port 80? This might be because of firewalls, convenience for your users, or some other reason. Depending how your machine is set up, this can be done in several ways.

Do you have multiple IP addresses for your machine? If so, you can use the -address flag to get ProjectForum to listen on just one of the addresses. You'll also of course have to make sure that your existing web server also is just listening on one address (not the same one obviously). All web servers should allow specifying a single IP address to listen to (rather than by default listening to all addresses), but some are a bit more reluctant to do so than others (*cough* IIS *cough*).

If you have a single IP address but can provide multiple network names for that address, you can use name-based web proxying, which is often used for virtual hosting. We have a Proxying HOWTO that describes in more detail what this is about and how you might go about setting it up.

Finally, you may also want to integrate ProjectForum so that it appears as part of your existing web site. Again, proxying will help you do this (though in this case, it won't be name-based proxying, but proxying from a particular directory in your web server). You may also want to think about creating a new theme to modify the appearance of ProjectForum to look more like other pages on your existing web site.

Q: I want to modify ProjectForum; if I buy a license, do I get source code?

Source code for ProjectForum is not available, with or without a purchased license.

In terms of making changes, you should of course check to see if the changes you want are already available through existing configuration options (look and feel changes, for example, are generally accommodated within the existing themes infrastructure).

As well, there are a number of other ways you may be able to modify ProjectForum's behavior, including calling out to other programs that can do the bulk of the work (via custom links). Browse some of the posts in this weblog to get a sense of these.

If you don't see what you like, please let us know about what kind of modifications you're looking to make. If it's something of general interest, we may want to add it to a future version of ProjectForum. If not, it might be possible to incorporate as a "hidden" feature (there are a few in there now). Or, we might be able to provide you a hook that will allow you to do what you want (and perhaps help with that). Depending on the scope of changes, this might even be something that is quick for us to add in. Plus, if we do the changes, we'll make sure things continue to work in future versions of ProjectForum.

New Beta.

Along with the public preview site running the upcoming version with the new WYSIWYG editor, we've also made available a beta version so that you can download it and try it on your own systems.

For all the Americans celebrating Thanksgiving, it'll give you something to check out in between digesting your dead bird (or Tofurkey) and shopping.

Q: Are there any limitations if I host with you vs. run it myself?

The most obvious difference in using our hosting plans to run ProjectForum rather than doing it yourself is the limit on the number of groups as well as the amount of disk space you can use, which vary by plan. If you're running things yourself, the number of groups depends on the size of the license purchased, while you can freely use as much disk space as you have available on the machine running the server.

If you sign up for our "Good" hosting plan, rather than having a ProjectForum server all to yourself, you get assigned a single group on a shared server. That doesn't mean that other people on the server can get into your group of course; you set up the group's permissions as you see fit. However, it does mean that features within the realm of "Site Administration" are not available. This includes for example creating a new custom theme (themes are site-wide).

The other limitation is that at present SSL is not available on any of our hosting plans.

Public Preview of New Editor.

The next major version of ProjectForum includes a new editor, which provides a more WYSIWYG-style editing option. We have made available a preview site running a beta version containing the new editor.

We'd encourage you to try it out, and provide us with any feedback or comments that you have.

We should be releasing a beta version that you can download and run on your own systems in the next week or so.

Tip: Using ProjectForum as a Content Management System

This tip is courtesy of Steve Landers of Digital Smarties, an innovative software consultantcy based in Perth, Australia.

We manage a bunch of websites both for ourself and our clients, and for a long time we've thought it would be nice to use ProjectForum to manage the content of some of them. With the Web Views feature in version 5.5 we've been able to do just that!

Web Views provide a view-only mirror of a forum whose content is updated as the forum changes. This in itself is great for managing a website, but there are a few ProjectForum features that allowed us to take this further - Custom Themes, the Include Markup, Key Pages, the Comments Markup and HTML tags.

We use Custom Themes to create two versions of a theme - one for maintaining the site (we just picked one of the built-in themes) and a copy of it to use with the Web View. In the theme for the web view, we then modified the #pageheader and #pagefooter sections in the Main Stylesheet with something like "#pageheader, #pagefooter { display: none }" so that the page header and footer don't appear (they'll actually still be there, but just not visible to the user). This stops the current page, forum name and key pages from appearing in the web view.

We wanted to include standard headers and footers on most pages. We did this with the Include Markup - e.g. added a line containing "[include Header]" to the top of each page visible in the Web View, then created a page called "Header" containing the markup we wanted to appear on each page. A typical use might be to include a logo at the top of each page, and some shortcut links at the bottom of each page. We found it convenient when maintaining the Header and Footer pages to add them to the Key Pages section of the Group Administration page.

An addition to web views that we requested has helped a lot with maintaining the site. Now if you include a comments divider on the page ("===comments===" on its own line), anything after that won't be shown on the web view. So now we can post comments in the page that won't appear on the site. This provides a convenient way for us to document the reason for changes, leave notes for each other, or maintain a To Do list on each page.

To get some of the cosmetics just the way we wanted them, we used a small amount of HTML tags in addition to the built-in ProjectForum markup (available by selecting the "Allow use of HTML tags" checkbox in the Settings section of the Group Administration page).

Q: Why do I get errors including a page from another forum?

So for example, trying to do [include:30#changes] produces a message "Could not include page", even if you have access to both the main forum and the referenced project.

The trick here is that to include something from another forum, that forum cannot have any read access restrictions on it. In other words, even though you may have access to it, that's not enough; it has to be open enough that anyone is able to view pages in the forum you're trying to include from.

Q: I run Ubuntu Linux... is there a .deb package?

No there is not. However, unlike most software for Linux, ProjectForum is a single executable, with no dependencies on anything else, which removes the pain of install/uninstall found in more complex packages (which the package managers are avoiding).

Tip: Ideas for getting the most out of collaboration.

Everyone's got their favorite weblogs, and I wanted to share one that will likely be of interest to many CourseForum and ProjectForum users.

Michael Sampson is an independent analyst and consultant, based in New Zealand. His expertise is in collaboration technology, and how best to apply it within organizations. While a lot of his energies are devoted towards enterprise-scale deployments, there's still obviously a lot of overlap with the workgroup-sized situations where ProjectForum is most often used.

Almost every day he publishes his "Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams (EC/VT) Report", pulling together various bits of information from the industry, media, blogosphere etc. into a nice concise report. His reports consist of three parts. The first, the "People part" of EC/VT is the most relevant, providing all kinds of insights and strategies into making collaborations and teams successful. The second part, "Technology trends" of EC/VT is helpful if you're interested in keeping up with the latest from many of the various collaboration tools vendors. Finally, "Insights on being productive and effective as an individual" brings together various tools, techniques and ideas for personal rather than group productivity.

Keeping up with all that's going on in this rich and diverse area is tough, but Michael's blog helps make it easier.

Q: Is there a calendar tool we can share on the forum?

There is no built-in calendar; different groups have vastly different needs when it comes to calendars, so it's almost impossible to include one that would come close to satisfying everyone. And the odds are, if you do need a calendar, you've probably already been using one.

If you already use an existing web-based calendar, you can obviously link to it directly from ProjectForum (and of course, link back from the calendar to ProjectForum, so that e.g. a scheduled meeting might link to a ProjectForum page with the meeting's agenda).

For groups who don't need a very complex calendar (e.g. a few group meetings a week), you may find it simple enough just to create a forum page named "Calendar" and place the appointments in that page, say as a list ordered by date and time. But for anyone who needs more than that, look at adding an external package to complement ProjectForum.

Version 5.6.1.

We've just posted version 5.6.1 of CourseForum and ProjectForum; these are minor updates that fix one printing related bug, and can help improve performance in certain circumstances.

Preview of New Editor.

One of the things we're busily working away on for an upcoming version is a new editor which will give you the option of using the current formatting codes for markup or letting you edit in a more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style.

We've created a preview site using the new editor, and are looking for some people to help try it out and provide some early feedback on the overall approach we've taken with this. If you're interested in helping, please email support@courseforum.com and we'll provide you with details.

Q: How can I store my data on a network drive that is automatically backed up?

If you're running on Unix, the data will be stored in the current working directory, so simply change to that directory before starting ProjectForum. On Mac OS X, you'd need to use the (bundled) command line version, which would work the same. However, there are certainly performance implications for keeping the data you're using on a separate machine from the one you're running on, so it's not recommended.

On Windows - DON'T. Besides the performance issues mentioned above, the techniques that ProjectForum uses to store data (and to do it very quickly) unfortunately interact badly with some limitations on Windows when it comes to shared drives. Simply put, do not run ProjectForum over a mounted network share, or you risk serious corruption of your data.

You can of course copy the datafiles from your local machine to the remote drive so they will be backed up, just don't have ProjectForum using the remote drive itself.

Tip: Structured information.

A wiki like ProjectForum doesn't force a particular structure on pages, which can be both a strength and a weakness. Keeping things flexible makes it easy to adapt to particular circumstances and exceptions, because rather than everything being a strict field, it's just text.

That doesn't preclude keeping information that is more traditionally structured in ProjectForum. Let's say you want to keep track of a set of people who have contacted your company, with the usual information like name, company name, phone number, and so on.

The ProjectForum model for doing this is to first create a page template for 'Contacts'; a page template being some boilerplate that you can choose to insert into a newly created page. For our contact page, it would have the usual name, company etc. areas. Again though, these would be plain or simply formatted text (look at some of the built-in templates for examples). Each page would also contain a link at the bottom to a page named 'Category Contacts'. That page can contain a list of all the contact pages (automatically built up by the links in each to the category page).

So when someone wants to add a new contact, they'd first select 'New Page', and then choose your 'Contacts' template from the menu at the top. The template would be added to the page, and they could begin filling in the information. Also, since it is freeform, they can delete information that isn't relevant, or add other information that is relevant. And because it's just like any other page, others can edit the information, add their own notes about the contact to the page, and so on.

Want to find all the contacts? Visit the 'Category Contacts' page, or do a search for 'Category Contacts' (since you know that appears in each page). Want a report of all the contacts, including the full information on each? From the search results page, select the 'Include page contents in results' checkbox and search again.

Q: How do I upgrade to the service version? What effect does this have on my existing data or license?

Upgrading to the Windows service version of CourseForum or ProjectForum from the normal (GUI) one is quite straightforward. The main thing you want to do is make sure that you've exited the existing version completely (you can uninstall it if you want, though it's not necessary; if you do, don't delete your existing data in the process!).

After the GUI version is no longer running, you'd just install the service version. It will automatically pick up your existing data, including your license.