CourseForum and ProjectForum

Q: Is every comment in the forum emailed out?

At present, the contents of comments or other page changes are not mailed out; instead the email includes a link back to the page. The mechanism for sending works like this... people can add their email addresses to a specific page (or forum as a whole) along with a time (e.g. "notify me no more than once every four hours, once a day or whatever"). Then whenever the page changes -- any change -- the notification is sent out (respecting the "once per X" limits).

Of course, for on-demand updates, the page and forum RSS feeds are your best bet.

Tip: Hiding the 'Create New Group' button.

The site home page (which lists all groups on the server) contains a form with a 'Create New Group' button in it. The way most sites are set up, pressing the button will ask for the 'create group' or 'site administrator' passwords. (There is of course an 'anyone can create groups' setting in Site Admin to bypass this).

If you really do want to hide the button (from everybody, including admins), you can do so via a little HTML and Javascript trick. In Site Admin, go into 'Messages', and then at the end of your 'Home page message', add this:

	<script>document.forms[0].style.display = 'none';</script>

If you later want to create a new group, you could just remove the line, create the group, and put it back.

Version 6.1 Released.

Version 6.1 of both ProjectForum and CourseForum has been released. As always, full details can be found in the changelog.

Beta Release: 6.1b1

We've released the first beta of CourseForum and ProjectForum version 6.1, which adds support for using authenticated SMTP servers, and also adds a brand new "email to page" feature. You can find full details and downloads on our beta page.

Q: Is it possible to share projects among groups?

Projects are attached to individual groups, so each can be in a single group only.

However, "group" here refers to workspaces in the software, rather than a single group of users (though there is usually a correlation). If projects are accessed by people from many different groups, one way to set things up is to have one groups for each of your teams, plus another group that everyone has access to. That last one could contain the projects you want shared.

Q: Can I spin-off a selection of pages into a new group?

Right now the only way to move a bunch of pages from one group to another is to do it manually (i.e. copy and paste).

Q: How do I reset the password for a user account?

This is for per-group user accounts; reset a password by loading the accounts screen, locating the name of the user you'd like to reset the password for, and then put a semi-colon after their name followed by the new password. Don't touch the lines for any other users. So it should look like:

Bob

Joe

Billy;newpass

Sue

Jenny

If you add semi-colons to other users it will reset their passwords. Similarly, if you delete them from the list it will remove their user account. So be careful to just change the one that you want.

Q: Can I publish my wiki "database" on external/public wiki sites?

On a public site running ProjectForum yes (e.g. our hosting service).

You can also export the wiki as a series of static HTML pages and associated images/files, which can then be uploaded to any website.

Q: What's the difference between free and demo licenses?

There are several variations of the software, differentiated by the type of license you have. Each has a different set of features available. You can compare the versions.

Where it can get confusing though is that it's just a single program that is downloaded; depending what kind of license key you plug into it, it will turn into the particular version.

So if you just download it and don't put in a license key, it's the "free" version. On our website you can request a demo license, which sends you a time-limited 10 group "standard" license to try out. So the demo license is really just a standard license, having the same set of features, just that it has an expiry date on it.

Q: I set a password on a page and I cannot edit it. Now what?

If you sign in as the administrator for the group, you'll be allowed to edit the page (what it will do is put the current lock password in the field for you)... and of course remove the lock password. This works similarly for administrator passwords also; if you've forgotten the admin password for a project, the group admin can get into the project admin area and retrieve or change it. Similarly, the site admin can get into any group to retrieve or change the group admin password. If you forget the site admin password though, you'll have to reset the site admin password, as described in our FAQ.