Centralized Users: Message Board

[Angryboy]

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NOTE: THE BELOW INFORMATION IS FOR THE OLD VERSION OF CUSERS. Go to this post to see the new version.


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Something I've been working on recently and have wanted to do since summer last year. By heavily adapting TutsPlus's 'PHP/MySQL forum from scratch' tutorial to n00dles' DM Matrix XML Database plugin (and building on the tutorial to add more functions), I've managed to put together an alpha for a GetSimple Message Board plugin (as such, it's only in English. Sorry).

How to use:
- Download and install DM Matrix in the /plugins directory
- Download and install the Message Board plugin (link below) in the /plugins directory
- Go to Plugins -> Message Board -> 'click here to set up tables'. The tables will then be created and populated.
- Go to Pages -> Create New Page; create a page with the slug 'forum' and do not give it any page content. Save.
- To access the forum's home page (no content on it), go to yourdomain.com/index.php?id=forum&msgboard. To see the categories, go to yourdomain.com/index.php?id=forum&msgboard&categories.
- Note: to log in with the initially created admin account, the username/password are admin/admin - I will soon add a code that will let users change their password and later call for it with a 'forgotten password?' script.
- To set a user to a forum admin, go to Plugins -> Message Board -> Users -> Edit (on the corresponding record) and change the user's user_level to 2 (0 = member, 1 = moderator, 2 = admin).

Features:
- Can create users who can post in the forum
- Users can register themselves and sign in/signout
- Users can edit their own posts; moderators can edit everyone's posts
- Can edit basic settings of the forum from the GetSimple admin panel (forum name, tagline, css, etc...)
- (In theory) If you're developing a plugin that requires users to sign in, you can use the contents of the 'users' table so that there is only one account needed for each user (e.g. same login allows a user to post in the forum and post a comment on an article, if the article script pulls data from the 'users' table).
- BBCode is activated in posts

To be added
- A simple CAPTCHA system to prevent bots from registering (added in v0.2)
- Avatar and Signature Support (partially added in v0.2)
- A simple, neutral skin as a basic interface for the forum
- Ability for moderators/admins to move topics (added in v0.2)
- Adding 'sections' to group the categories (or perhaps renaming 'categories' to 'forums' and giving each forum its own category). (added in v0.3))
- Order threads by priority (first announcements, then stickies, then latest updated thread) (added in v0.2)
- Pagination in general (especially when displaying posts) (added in v0.3)

Still very much an alpha, so this is really just being posted here for testing purposes to see if it actually works (assuming anyone is interested in trying it out it). If anything, I'm hoping that someone with more knowledge and care of plugin creation might use this as a basis to develop something more solid, as my knowledge of PHP is limited in comparison to the developers here.

Gigantic thanks to n00dles101 for even making this possible with the DM Matrix. I'm honestly surprised that it isn't in Extend yet.