Forum

Demo | Support | Documentation

Overview

Forum pack for cobalt is the great way quickly create forum on your site. It has great features.

Features

1. Support Ticket system. It is configured not only to be public forum, but on of the categories configured to be private support ticket system. it is good because you do not need 2 different section on the site but you may have all forum and support desk in one section which looks the same and very easy to manage.

2. Discussions *. It is very often when you need to create discussion on the forum connected to other article. For example you have Product catalog. And instead of comments you may use this forum to discuss every single product by connecting topic and product with relation fields. In the product you will see list of discussion about this product and "Start New Discussion" button. You can connect with forum and discuss any Cobalt created article.

* Discussions are not implemented in this pack since relate fields are commercial but we wanted to keep this pack free. This is a description of open possibility.

3. Look and feel of common forums. The templates created for this pack replicate visual style of forums like phpBB, Invision Board, … It is native for users to understand but fits current Joomla template.

4. Moderatos. You can set different moderators with different rights liek Edit topics, delete topics, make featured (or make sticky), close topic or access restricted content if you want this moderator to see topics in private ticket area.

5. Speed. One of the greatest concerns. And Cobalt 30% of development time was spend on architecting, optimising, testing all to achieve good speed. We can guaranty stable speed on forum with 100 000+ topic.

6. Notifications * This is really coolest thing possible. users may see what is happening and never lose replay or new topic.

   

   You will love it.

7. Quote. Especially for forum article list template we developed addition that allow to quote selected text or whole post and add quotation to HTML editor.

8. All Cobalt awesome features. And of course this pack as built on Cobalt, accept all huge number of coolest Cobalt features like menu, user home with all his topics, fulltext search, filtering and on and on.

Pros And Cons

What are the pros and cons to use forum based on Cobalt over integration of native forum applications into Joomla.

pro

1. It is 100% joomla 2.5 native.
2. It looks and feels like rest of you site. Does not looks foreign like some other forums.
3. Tons of other cool features that other forums do not have.
4. If you have other sections of your site built with Cobalt they all works together.
5. Combine with private support ticket system.
6. Use as discussion for any other Cobalt article types.
7. UddeIM integration

con

Cobalt is a CCK is not a native forum. This pack is a forum built on top of CCK, so it lacks some of common forum features.

1. No topic splitting
2. No topics merging

Installation

1. Please be sure you have latest Cobalt installed at least version 7.8874. Please read quick start or watch short video.
2. Just install forum pack as you install any other extension into Joomla.
3. Open your frontend. You will see "Forum" link in main menu.