CourseForum and ProjectForum

Q: How do I delete a group?

A: Only the site administrator can do this. Sign in as the site administrator, and go to the group directory (home) page for the site. Click on the icon beside the name of the group you'd like to delete, and you'll be taken to an Information page for that group. From there, you can delete the group (or just archive it; remember, deleting a group is permanent!).

Power Users: Site-wide Images.

One easy but very useful application of custom links is to create a new command so that inserting a standard image into a page is easy. This might be for example a company or product logo, or anything else that would be commonly found in different groups across the site.

Let's create a new custom link to make it easy to display the ProjectForum logo in any wiki page. First, go into the "Site Administration" area of your site, and then click on "Custom Links" along the top.

Hit "Create" to add a new custom link. Fill in the fields like this:

• Prefix: "img". This is the first part of the markup command that will be used to refer to the custom link.
  
• Selector: "pf". This custom link will only be invoked if the given selector is provided right after the "img:" prefix.
  
• Parameters: "0". We don't need users to provide any additional information to show this image.
  
• Type: "Inline HTML". We want the custom link to be replaced with the HTML we specify.
  
• Body: "<img border=0 src='http://www.projectforum.com/img/title_pf.jpg' />". This is the HTML to display when the custom link appears.
  

Save your changes. Then if you go into any forum on your site, and place "[img:pf]" on your site, it will get displayed as the ProjectForum logo, using the HTML we provided in the custom link. This makes it very quick and easy for your users to refer to the logo, and also means if you go back and change the custom link (to point to a new version at a different URL, for example) the new version will automatically show up everywhere.

Have more than one standard image you want users to have easy access to? For each one, create a new custom link. It should be the same as the one above, except you'll change the selector (e.g. "foo" if you want your users to be able to type in "[img:foo]"), and the URL of the image in the body. So this way you can provide a whole range of images for your users.

Obviously this technique isn't restricted to just images — you can use it to provide almost any standard material, such as common "boilerplate" that appears on many pages.

Patch Version 5.5.1.

We've put out a patch release for version 5.5; this corrects a couple of problems with the new "web views" feature, and also fixes some other minor issues. See the main CourseForum or ProjectForum page for download links and links to change logs.

Q: How do I get back the site administrator password if I've lost it?

A: In the Mac and Windows version, look in the menus associated with the small window that comes up when you start ProjectForum. You'll find a menu item saying "Reset Site Password..." which will clear the password so you can go in and set a new one. In the command line versions, stop ProjectForum, run "projectforum -resetpassword" and then start it up again.

Tip: Viewing a page without all the menus etc.

Often it's useful to get a view of the page without all the various editing tools, commands, etc. that are part of the normal wiki page you see in ProjectForum — for example, when you want to print the page. To do this, you can click the "Print" link near the bottom of each page. While that does get rid of most everything, it does leave the overall page style intact, which can in some themes provide some large headings or margin areas.

If you really want to get rid of everything except just the page content, here is how. You'll notice when you do "Print", the browser shows a URL that looks something like "http://www.foo.com/mywiki/5?view=print". If you go into your browser's location bar and change the word "print" to "content" (so it reads ".../mywiki/5?view=content") and load that page. Voila, just your content!

Q: Do you offer an educational discount?

A: Pricing for our CourseForum product already includes a substantial educational discount. For ProjectForum, we can offer a 20% discount on licenses of 10 groups or larger, but there is no discount available on the smaller licenses. If you'd like to take advantage of this discount, please contact us.

Power Users: Custom Links

One often overlooked feature is the custom links feature. This helps you create entirely new formatting commands that your users can place in pages.

Why would you want to do that? While CourseForum and ProjectForum come with a good number of formatting commands, the number of these commands has been deliberately kept fairly small; each new one that gets added makes the system harder to use and work with. Sure, it's possible to embed HTML into the pages to accomplish pretty much anything you want, but that's not the most user-friendly approach unless your user community are all hardcore engineers.

So you can use custom links to create new formatting that your users may find particularly useful for the type of communication they're using the wikis for (again, keeping in mind that adding things just for the sake of adding them is usually counter-productive because of the learning curve). Some obvious candidates include color, blockquoting, other font changes, and so on.

But you can also do a lot more complex things beyond just providing wrappers to standard HTML markup. Some examples: incorporating standard corporate images or boilerplate text, providing hooks into other communications tools like IM or an issue tracker, and even extracting data from corporate databases. All of this within a wiki page.

Over the next while we'll explore some of the things you can do with custom links, but in the meantime, have a read through our custom links HOWTO to get a bit of a feel for the mechanics of how custom links are created.

Q: Can I keep ProjectForum running after I log out from my machine? Now it stops.

A: On Windows, if you're running the normal version of CourseForum or ProjectForum (the one with the small window that appears with the start/stop buttons), you'll find that the application exits if you log out of your machine, which means nobody can access your site anymore. Some people never log out of their machines, but for others this can be a problem.

Besides the normal version with the small GUI window, there is also a Windows service version. A Windows service is a background program that stays running regardless of whether or not you are logged into your machine, which will make sure that your site stays running. So instead of the normal GUI version, make sure you download the service version, listed below the regular versions on the download pages.

Tip: Automatically redirect to a wiki.

If you've got a site with only a single group or course on it, you can set things up so that when a user loads the home page, they are automatically redirected into that single wiki. To do so, log in to the Site Administration area, and select the "Redirect to group/course when loading home page" checkbox.

Tip: Preventing spam.

These days, spam is unfortunately a reality if you're running any kind of public website that allows contributions from users, whether a forum, a blog that accepts comments, or a wiki.

For most users of ProjectForum and CourseForum, the sites are used internally, sometimes available only on a corporate network or VPN, in which case spam won't be an issue. For others, sites are already locked down completely with passwords, so that nobody can get into the site at all without a password. Again, spam shouldn't be an issue in this situation.

For even public sites, consider putting a password on the wiki in order to make any changes. This includes even posting comments; in fact, this is probably the most important area. Most spam is completely automated, and unfortunately most "spam robots" can take advantage of how easy it is to post comments into a forum.

Does this mean you need to prevent public access altogether? Usually not; you just need to make it easy for legitimate users to get access to the password. Because most spam is automated through robots, it's surprisingly effective to simply post a note on the Home page of your wiki saying "The password for this wiki is whatever-password-you've-set".

Q: What is a single group/wiki?

A: The software is licensed based on the number of wikis you can create, rather than the number of users. In ProjectForum, each wiki acts as its own independent working space - its own set of pages, own set of users, etc.

Normally, if you have two different groups of people working on different things, they'd set up their own wiki, just to avoid "colliding" with each other. If you've got a group of people all more or less working on the same thing, it makes sense to have them share a single working space, i.e. a single wiki.

For example, you can visit one of our hosted sites at http://groups.projectforum.com/. Each of the items listed on the left is a single self-contained wiki, in this case all owned by different people and used for different things.

The licensing covers how many of these you want to create in the software - how you use each one, and if you have one or more than one is entirely up to you. A lot of people start with one, and as they end up using it for more different things, they decide to add more so they can split things off. Again, no limits on number of users per wiki, or pages, or anything else. If you have a chance to try the software, you'll get a sense of this.

Q: How do I upgrade to the new version of the software?

A: With any upgrade, the procedure is the same. First, shut down any existing version of the software that you're running. Make sure that the application is actually not running any longer (e.g. in Task Manager on Windows). Then, download and install the newer version of the software right over top of the old one. Finally, start up the new one. The new version will automatically pick up all your existing data: wikis, users, licensing, etc.

Speaking of which... if you're running a licensed version, make sure that your license covers you for the new version before upgrading, otherwise your site will revert back to the free version! No data is lost, just many features won't be available until you either revert back to an older version of the software or upgrade your license. You can check to see if your license will cover the new version in the main Site Administration page of your site.

New Releases: Version 5.5.

Version 5.5 of both ProjectForum and CourseForum are now available, both on our hosting service, and for download from our website. There are a few new features in this one, including the new "web views" feature for managing static external sites through the wiki, and also a number of both externally visible and internal bug fixes and improvements in this release, as you can see from the full list of changes.

Welcome to our new weblog!

If you're reading this, you've already figured out that we've replaced our older weblog with this brand spanking new one, at the new address of blog.courseforum.com. But the change of URL and underlying software isn't that exciting.

We want to do a lot more blogging here than we've been doing previously. It's almost sad how modest a goal this is; whereas previously our blog was just a way to find out about new releases, we really want to make more of an effort here to ensure that you get the most out of your ProjectForum or CourseForum wikis.

But yes, we'll still be posting release announcements here, including both new releases and all beta versions and patch releases (our announcements email list will normally carry only new releases, not betas or patches). We'll also continue to post any important status updates, or any other changes that you'll need to know about.

So what else can you expect to see? Each week, we'll be answering questions that we receive from people, both more frequently asked ones, as well as some that are less common, and occassionally downright esoteric.

This software has been constantly evolving over the last five years, thanks to amazing feedback from very motivated users, which is a great thing. The downside is that it is at times deceptively deep, and it can be easy to ignore certain areas altogether. So you'll also see tips each week that will introduce you to (or remind you of) some of the less obvious but very useful program features or ways of working with the software that can really help make your life easier.

Power users will also learn some new tips and techniques to help them tailor their wikis to make them both easier and more powerful for their user community. Periodically, we'll also explore some of the deeper issues, looking at why certain things are done the way they are, and some of the bigger picture issues that may help you decide how best to use the software in your organization.

We'd also like to invite people to share their experiences with either ProjectForum or CourseForum. We've been astounded at some of the ways people have come up with to use the software, and having people share their experiences with others will be a great way for everyone to learn and get new ideas for how to make the most of the software in your situation. Unlike more public wikis like Wikipedia, most ProjectForum and CourseForum sites are internal or password protected, so many of these great ideas have been hidden. Hopefully we can coerce a few people to share some of their most (or least) successful experiences from behind the firewall.

And of course, we'd welcome any suggestions you may have for other things that you'd like to see on this weblog (or for that matter in the software, or any other aspect of what we do).

But for now, we'd invite you to subscribe to this blog's feed using your favorite newsreader. And after you've done that, please check out the latest versions of ProjectForum and CourseForum...