Chronoforums. Written by ClubAero.nl, 8 th December 2013

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1 Written by ClubAero.nl, 8 th December 2013 Chronoforums ClubAero.nl is an association set up in the Netherlands to lease or charter a regional airliner for short single day or weekend ski-trips. After registering our organization in the Netherlands our first step was to build a website for our members. We don t have a lot of money well actually, we don t have any money at all so like it or not, we have to rely on open source community software. We like it! Some of the best software available is offered free of charge by the Chronoforms team. As a founder member of ClubAero.nl it was my job to start on the website. I had already had some experience using the Chronoforms extension. You can see the Chronoforms we use on our website survey page and on the page where you can enroll as a member of ClubAero.nl Chronoforms is one of the best Joomla extensions available, much better than most of the commercial software! The documentation however is poor which explains why so many users are constantly posting questions to Greyhead on the Chronoforms forum. I haven t yet worked out whether Bob Janes or Max Payne is the mythical Greyhead. But I can assure you that Bob and/or Max seem to spend around 25 hours a day answering all your questions. Their support is fantastic! Bearing this in mind, I decided to use the new Chronoforums extension for our Joomla 3.2 version of the website which we are currently developing. The name is not ideal just one extra letter doesn t really make it clear to users that we are actually talking about a totally different product from Chronoforms.

2 The confusion was compounded by the fact that at this stage there is hardly any documentation to be found anywhere! I therefore resorted to the questions and answers on the Chronoforum user forum where I found this posting, with an answer from Max Payne: Joomla é ChronoForums_V1_RC4_J2.5_J3.0 I downloaded and installed ChronoForums, but I can't find how to access it. Attached some screen images of the installation Please, is there a Help, Manual, Guide or Tutorial for ChronoForums - how to install and use it? Thanks Hello, This should be straight forward: #1- go to the "Categories manager" and create few ones. #2- go to the "Forums manager" and create few ones. #3- go to the "Permissions" section and give permissions to the desired users groups. Test your forum using the direct link: index.php?option=com_chronoforums or simply create a new menu item of type "ChronoForums" Regards, Max That s it! But to be fair, Max and Bob are offering non-commercial software so it would be out of place to criticize without doing something to help! So I decided to document my trial and error experiments with the new Chronoforum extension and offer the document to anyone who may be interested.

3 I am developing my site offline with Joomla 3.2 running locally under Wampserver.

4 Joomla offers different ways of installing extensions to the core CMS. The options are: Install from extensions website Install from a zip package

5 Install from a directory Install from a URL I usually use the package install. Browse to the extension and click the download button. Save in a location on your computer. Next, select the install package option from the Joomla dashboard and choose the zip file which you just downloaded. Click the blue upload & install button and Chronoforums will be installed in your website.

6 After installing you will see this control screen for the Chronoforum. At the top right you can see eight tabs for creating forum categories, forums, tags, ranks, settings, permissions, etc. I told you this will be a trial and error user guide so you can follow me as I try the various tabs. First of all let s take another look above at the posting from Max Payne: #1- go to the "Categories manager" and create few ones. #2- go to the "Forums manager" and create few ones. #3- go to the "Permissions" section and give permissions to the desired users groups. Well the first tab is the Categories manager. We ll try to create a couple of categories. First click the tab button and we see this screen: We now click the New button (top right) and we get a form for creating a Chronoforum category. Let s be original and call our first category First_cat.

7 I don t yet know what they mean by position so I have left it empty for the time being. Is that one of the template positions where the forum screens will be shown? I presume that the forum screens will show up in the main content container so this Chronoforum position parameter probably stands for something else we will see! I have not changed any of the permissions. The default value for all the different user classifications is allowed. For test purposes only this is fine for us. It will presumably allow all users to use all of the available forum functionality. At the top right there are three buttons apply, save and cancel. Apply should suit us nicely. It should create our category, first_cat. Let s create another category. We ll call this one Second_cat - our creativity is boundless. Same procedure: we click the New button, fill in the title, Second_cat, the alias cat2 and the description this is the 2 nd category for this Chronoforum and lastly click the apply button. This time we will also click Save which should return us to the Categories Manager:

8 Next step is to go to the Forums manager and create few ones I assume Max means create a few test forums? I guess the Home button should take us back to the configuration screen. Yes - It does! So now we choose Forums Manager from the second button at the top right of the configuration screen. The Forums Manager screen now appears and I click new (first button top right) to create a forum.

9 It seems much the same as creating a category same screen layout and same parameters: title, alias, description, etc. After creating a test forum which - with another amazing flair of imagination - I have called test forum, I click on Apply and Save and return to the Forums Manager. Historically a forum was a place where people could publicly air their opinions and make statements about any particular theme or topic to everyone present in the forum at the time. A digital forum is just the same. So creating a new forum in Chronoforums should presumably imitate a real life forum. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear to me yet whether creating a forum in Chronoforums is equivalent to creating a new (digital) location where discussions can take place or does it amount simply to creating new topics for discussion? I would put my money on the first interpretation the creation of a digital location. If I am right then we still have to create topics for discussion in our forum. Presumably that can be done from the front end by users who are authorized to do so. That would make sense. If I now select the permissions tab in the configuration screen I can see all sorts of functions for which execution rights can be allocated to different user groups - functions such as create topics, Post replies, Modify/moderate Topics, and so on. If we skip this step and fail to allocate specific permissions then allocation of permissions seems to take place according to some sort of default which is inherited. I don t know where the default settings come from but presumably these are defined by Chronoforums. Possibly the default settings can be adjusted using the settings tab in the main configuration screen, although it is not obvious to me where this could be done?

10 Under the settings tab there is an option to set Forum permissions to Yes or No. No is the default value. There is a footnote here which says: Enable the per category/forum permissions. If you enable this (i.e. select the Yes value) then please make sure to correctly configure the permissions under the forums/categories section. I take it that this means that if we leave this value set to No then the default permissions per category/forum will remain inherited from Chronoforum s default values. It would seem as though we are now ready to link to our new forum. It is called test forum and it has two categories of topics, First_cat and Second_cat. Of course it could be the other way around i.e. that Chronoforums can contain one or more forums per category rather than one or more categories per forum! (That sounds a bit odd to me, but then I have never been a great fan of categories. In a digital system there are much better ways of indexing and locating the content. ) According to Max s brief instruction above, the last thing for us to do is to browse to the forum. We can do that by creating a menu item which points to the Chronoforum or by appending index.php?option=com_chronoforums to the base URL of our website.

11 And that s where this user guide ends! I tried both of these options the menu item and the direct link via the URL and in both cases I simply get a timeout! In the horizontal menu of Joomla s default sample content I have added a new menu item of the type Chronoforums, Board home page. It can be seen here next to Home in this screenshot: Unfortunately, when I click on the menu item I just get a time-out. Maybe that is a result of not having filled in the position parameter when creating our categories and our forum. But whatever the reason we have come to full stop so I am afraid this user guide now has to end here.

12 Aaaaagh!

13 Chronoforums After my failure to get our first forum up and running I posted a message to the ChronoEngine team on their own forum. Their response was quick at to the point: I told you their support was good! (Incidentally, on their site they are using the phpbb Group forum software presumably because they seem to have been active at least since the turn of the millenium, long before they ever got around to creating their own Chronoforums software). Here you can see my postings and their responses to date at ChronoEngine.com. I haven t yet discovered why I get a timeout on my basic Joomla 32 sample site when I try to link to a newly created Chronoforum, but there have been some developments since I wrote the above text, ending with the timeout display. I still don t know the cause of the timeout error but, whatever it may have been, it seems it had nothing to do with the position parameter. This is Max s comment on the ChronoEngine website forum pages:.. and no, the error is not related to the "position" field, that field should only be used for "ordering" the forums list! Since I had failed to get Chronoforums up and working properly in my sample J32 site I decided to try it in my multilingual development site which I am working on for ClubAero.nl. I ve no idea why, but that worked okay!

14 Here in this screenshot you can see the forum page with a topic which I created from the frontend after logging in as my super user Joomla site administrator. Of course to get this far I had to create forum 1 and link to the forum with a newly created menu item. To achieve this I repeated the steps described above installing Choronoforums, creating a couple of categories and a single forum for one of the categories. This time I called the categories English and Dutch with the intentions of using the categories for the English and Dutch pages in the multilingual site. Unfortunately it doesn t seem as though this is the right way to implement a multilingual version of the forum for use on my site I am not even sure if there is any way of doing this properly.

15 Anyway, after creating forum 1 within the English category I noticed the first problem. I was in the Dutch version of my site and the heading line TOPICS REPLIES VIEWS LAST POST is overwritten by Dutch text: I sorted this by selecting the English site language on the site home page, but it begins to look as though I won t be able to use the Chronoforums software on a multilingual site? I hope I am wrong about this.. The next problem was setting the permission required to create a topic. I was right about my assumption that a new topic is created from the front end by a user with the correct permission, but wrong about passively leaving the allocation of permissions to system default values. Assigning the permission has to be done actively from the dashboard. All the permissions seemed to be set to allowed by default when I created the categories. Via the permission settings tab, as I noted above, I had also seen that permissions are all inherited by default. So I assumed that by logging in as site administrator with super user rights I would automatically by able to create a new topic. Wrong! I had to go to the dashboard and set the permission for super user explicitly to allowed in order to create a new topic. Only then did I succeed in creating the topic which I called Testing Chronoforums. After I succeeded in creating this topic I then began to discover other anomalies which may or may not be due to my lack of knowledge of the software.

16 I told you this user guide was simply an attempt to document my trial and error experiments. For what it is worth I shall mention some of the problems I encountered. I leave it up to you if you want to let me know if you have succeeded better than I did with your Chronoforums installation! In the search box you can see the text search all forums. If I had more than one forum on my site then presumably a user might want to select a particular forum. I therefore entered the title of my forum, forum 1 as a search argument in the search box. The Chronoforums search routine was not happy with this: Okay, so how about doing a search on the forum description which I had entered when I created the forum: The first and only test forum. The search routine cheered up a bit with this search argument and came back with: Hmmm! Something peculiar is happening here. I have in the meantime created two topics and posted a message to each topic. The 1 st topic is titled Testing Chronoforums and the 2 nd topic is titled Testing Chronoforums with a 2 nd topic. Here you can see my posting to the 2 nd topic in forum 1.

17 When creating this posting all went well no 404 errors, the posting button and the submit button both worked okay (even though they look a bit greyed out ). So now I return to the board index and enter 2 nd topic in the search argument. You would expect the search function to locate the 2 nd topic in the forum after all, that is the only topic with the search argument in its title. But despite this, the search function locates both topics. Weird!

18 So what happens if I go back to the board index and enter Testing Chronoforums in the search argument? As you see, there are two topics with this text in the title. The result of the search is surprising! It now only finds one of the topics..

19 If I click on the title of a topic, the posting which I made for the topic is displayed. Here it is again: Unfortunately I can t test what happens if there is more than one message posted to the topic since trying to reply to this posting just didn t work at all.. My mistake! To reply to a posting I have to be logged in with permission to reply.

20 In the permission settings I had only allowed super user to create new topics but I had neglected to allow all the other functions such as edit posts, delete posts, attach files and all the rest. Go to the permissions tab in the dashboard and here you can see the other forum functions which need to be allocated to the user: How do you go about posting a reply? Well, first of all make sure that the user has all the necessary permissions. Here in this screen shot you can see the icons which Chronoforums uses to display the permissions. If you move the mouse over an icon you see a tooltip label such as the delete in this screenshot.

21 I thought it would be a good idea to see if the delete icon in the above screenshot disappears if the delete rights for super user are set to denied. So I went to the permissions tab in the dashboard and chose denied in the dropdown list for for delete permissions. But when I returned to the Chronoforums page in the frontend the delete icon was still showing: I then clicked on the delete icon and something strange happened. This must be a bug in the software. You can see that the text from the posting has been expanded to the right outside the content frame. It is a mess! I don t know if it caused by something I have done but it should never have occurred. It is probably due to some sort of CSS conflict with my template? I suspect that for some reason the Chronoforums CSS for the content wrapper is not being applied to the text. HELLO CHRONOFORUMS TEAM.. To test this further I tried setting the template for the Chronoforms page to the standard Protostar template included with Joomla 3.2. The problem with the expanding text still occurs.

22 Do all the forum function icons always show in the forum page, even if the functions have not been allocated to the user in the permissions settings? No, they don t. The reason the delete icon was still showing, even after I had set the permission for the delete function to denied for super users, turns out to be because I was still logged in as site administrator with super user rights after setting the permission to denied in the Chronoforms dashboard. If I log out and then log in again the delete icon no longer shows up in the icon row in the forum display.

23 With a mouseover the function icons you can see the tooltip labels for each icon. Even with the tooltips, the relationship between the function icons and the functions which can be allocated via the permissions tab in the Chronoforums dashboard is not immediately clear to me. A minor issue in the Permissions display is that the page opens with the drop down for Create New Topics showing. The only way to close the drop down is to open one of the drop downs for another item. Here in this screenshot you can see the permissions. (I have photoshopped the list so that you can see all the functions without the drop downs showing). I guess it should be possible to see which permission is related to which icon in the frontend page display by testing each item, one by one. Set each permission for the user type to denied. Logout as user and then login again and see which icons are showing and which are missing. We have seen how the delete icon is removed if the Delete Posts permission is set to denied.

24 I then decided to try setting Attached Files to denied. That has no effect on the icons shown irrespective of whether you have logged out and logged in again for the relevant user type. But in the page with the text box for posting a reply (click on the reply button) the option to attach a file appears under the text box if the permission to Attach Files has been set to allowed. If the permission is denied, then the attach file option no longer shows up under the textbox. Well I could go on in this fashion for a while testing each function in the permissions list as I suggested, one by one, but I suspect that anyone reading this User Guide would quickly fall asleep. So I leave that up to you. Try the functions as you need them. Let s try to reply to the posting.

25 This is much the same as posting a new topic. Display the topic containing the message to which you want to post a reply. If you are not logged in or if you have not set the permission for your user type to allowed, you will not be able to post a reply: Check that out: set permission to allowed, logout and login again and now you can post a reply. Click on the reply button and you will see the page with the text box for posting messages:

26 Replying to a posting seems to work fine once the permissions have been allocated. You can see in the above screenshot that all sorts of editing functions are available. It even looks as though you can upload a flash video although these days flash videos seem to be becoming less popular with web users than they used to be. I gather that on mobile devices flash will no longer be available after Android 4.2, Jelly Bean. Probably flash will be replaced in the future by HTML5. Anyway, you might like to try some of the editing functions as you enter your reply. I have clicked on the reply button. A test box appears with all the necessary buttons to edit the text entered. I then enter my reply to my 2 nd topic and added an attachment to the reply:

27 Right now I seem to have more or less come to an end of my unofficial User Guide. Of course there is still a whole lot you can do to try out Chronoforums. I have just scratched the surface here. I did try the Migrate Data function in the dashboard, but that didn t work out properly When the function works properly it looks as though it can be used to import forums, topics and postings from other forum packets such as phpbb. In the dashboard there are tabs for Tags Manager, Ranks Manager, Migrate data, Delete Cache and last but not least: Validate install. The validate install asks you to contribute a small amount of cash to help the people at ChronoEngine to keep up the good work. The amount they ask for is very small compared to what they are offering. I seem to remember that I paid around 25,- to validate my Chronoforms installation in my online website, ClubAero.nl. I recommend that you also help these guys at ChronoEngine.

28 As my trial and error experiment with Chronoforums has shown, the software is still not idiot proof. I have probably made all sorts of mistakes but there is still some stuff which needs to be sorted out: the text display which expands out of the container and the fatal errors should not have occurred, whatever I did wrong. Despite this, my impression with the software is that it is an excellent product with an enormous potential. You can probably use it now on your site without too many problems if you test it well beforehand. After some of the weaknesses and bugs are sorted it should become a world beater. My guess is that within a couple of years it is likely to be real competition for Kunena and phpbb!