Hello TYPO3 community,

as of today, the new mm_forum version 1.9.0 is available in the TYPO3 Extension Repository. The new version brings a lot of features and fixes a wide range of bugs. Following a short overview over the new features:

New Features¶

Front-end Administration¶

The mm_forum_pi1 plug-in now contains a front-end administration plug-in. This allows administrators to create or edit forums directly from the TYPO3 front-end. By this way, you do not need back-end access in order to create or edit forums or categories.

Salted passwords¶

The mm_forum extension now works together with both t3sec_saltedpw (for TYPO3 v4.2) and saltedpasswords (for TYPO3 v4.3). This means that if one of the mentioned extensions is installed, passwords saved with the registration or user settings plug-in are automatically encrypted with an additional "salt value" increasing the security of the generated passwords.

Page browsing¶

In order to display page navigation panels, the forum extension will now use Dmitry Dulepov's pagebrowse extension. This way, you can easily configure all page navigations on your site to look alike.

Minor features¶

A lot of minor features were implemented. These include:

• Inclusion of Javascript Frameworks was outsourced into a static template
• Additional user profile fields can be required as unique in the fe_users table
• Removed deprecated function calls.

Please see the official change log for a complete list: http://forge.typo3.org/versions/show/212

Additional Extensions¶

Some bigger functionalities were outsourced into seperate extensions. These features include the following:

Import¶

The data import functionality is now done by the mm_forum_import extension. At the moment, this extension supports data import from CHC Forum and phpBB v3. Please note that the mm_forum_import extension is still in alpha state. The mm_forum_import extension is available in version 1.0.0 in the TYPO3 Extension Repository as of today.

Commenting¶

Using the mm_forum_comments and mm_forum_news extensions, you can now use the mm_forum extension to enable your users to comment on pages or tt_news articles. Credits go to Hauke Preuss for implementing these extensions. Both extensions are available in the TYPO3 Extension Repository as of today.

Credits¶

Credits for the 1.9 version go to Hauke Preuss and Peter Schuster for implementing a wide range of new features (like the commenting interface by Hauke) and providing patches for a lot of bugs, Ines Willenbrock for testing everything and keeping the bugtracker in order, and all the various community members who went through a lot of effort to test the development versions from the SVN repository, commit bug reports and provide patches.

The version 1.8.3 of the mm_forum extension is now available in the TYPO3 Extension Repository. The new version fixes a security related bug that allows Cross-Site Scripting.

The vulnerability can be avoided by using a specific TypoScript setup. The new version just modifies the default value for a specific configuration property. If for any reason, you cannot upgrade to the new version, you can fix the xss vulnerability just as good by inserting

plugin.tx_mmforum_pi1.validatorSettings.quotes = double

into your Typoscript setup. Credits go to Stefanos Karasavvidis, who initially discovered the problem.

The version 1.8.2 is now available in the TYPO3 extension repository. This version fixes a bug with the new TYPO3 4.3 caching framework and the mm_forum cronjob interface.

As of today, the 1.8.1 version is available in the TYPO3 Extension Repository. The new version fixes a caching-related bug that interferes with the user permission system, causing unregistered users to see closed forums.
Furthermore, a bug in the user editing plugin has been fixed that occurred when the kb_md5fepw extension is installed.

As of today, the new version 0.1.8 of the mm_forum extension is finally available for download in the TYPO3 extension repository. After nearly an entire year of development, we are proud to present a whole list of new features, improvements regarding both useability and performance and a very long list of bugfixes.

Major Changes¶

Rating system¶

The mm_forum extension now uses the ratings extension provided by Netcreators BV allowing users to rate forums, topics posts and users. The rating functionality can be enabled or disabled for each kind of data (forum, topic, posts and user) separately using a Typoscript configuration setting. For the rating feature to work, of course the ratings extension has to be installed.

Improved profile field handling¶

Since the handling of user defined fields for the user profile has been somewhat complicated in previous versions (input and output fields had to be specified using a creepy Typoscript configuration), the user field functionality has been redesigned from scratch. When creating an additional user field, the administrator can select between a lot (and in most cases more than sufficient) set of predefines field types (text input field, select box, check box and radio button). Instead of configuring each option using a Typoscript configuration parameter, all field properties (required, link to fe_users table, etc.) can now be defined using the new GUI.

New backend module¶

The backend module has been completely overhauled regarding both functionality and aesthetics.

Performance tuning¶

The performance of the mm_forum extension has been greatly improved by introducing a new caching mechanism and by some modifications in database layout and code structure.

Caching mechanisms¶

mm_forum now provides a caching mechanism that allows to store data in cache tables in the database, the file system or even in the server's RAM using PHP's APC extension. This improves the performance greatly, since a lot of data has to be computed and loaded only once and can then be used for each following request. If the mm_forum extension is installed on TYPO3 4.3, the TYPO3 Core caching framework is used instead of the built-in interface.

Database layout/Code structure¶

The database tables have been extended by some missing indices. Furthermore, the code structure has been optimized resulting in great performance boosts, especially if you deal with large amounts of data. Credits go to Christopher Lörken for this feature.

Documentation¶

The mm_forum documentation has been brough up-to-date in both design and content. Credits go to Ines Willenbrock.

Code refactoring¶

The source code of the extension has been extensively refactored, resulting in a much cleaner code structure and better configurability. Most of the Typoscript configuration has been taken out of plugin.tx_mmforum_pi1 and moved to plugin.tx_mmforum, which is inherited by all six plugins. Backwards compatibility to existing configurations should still be ensured. Credits go to Benjamin Mack of the TYPO3 Core development team.

Bugfixing¶

Needless to say that a very long list of bugs has been fixed.

Complete Changelog¶

You can find a complete list of improvements and changes in the official changelog.

Credits¶

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the new version of the mm_forum extension:

• Ines Willenbrock, for taking care of the documentation and the bugtracker and for testing every new feature.
• Benjamin Mack, for rewriting and refactoring nearly the entire mm_forum core.
• Hauke Hain, for commiting more bug reports and patches than everyone else together.
• Christopher Lörken, for providing some patches improving the performance greatly
• Guy Sinden, for providing an updated version of the french translation
• Nathan Lenz, for developing a cronjob script to notify moderators about reported posts
• Everyone who continuously tested the trunk version and reported at least one bug in the bug tracker
• Everyone who downloaded the mm_forum extension and told at least one other person that it was great ;)

As of today, the development of the mm_forum extension has been ported to the TYPO3 Forge. All further development of the mm_forum extension will be done over this platform.

You will find a bug/featuretracker under the menu item Issues. You will need a TYPO3.org account in order to report bugs or feature wishes.

The SVN repository has also improved. We now have a trunk containing the current state of development, a directory called tags containing the versions that have been released of the mm_forum to the TYPO3 Extension Repository and a directory called branches that contains alternative development branches. Please note that it does not seem possible to download an entire SVN directory e.g. as tarball using the web interface. However, you now can do an anonymous SVN checkout of any file you like. On Unix-based operating systems, you can just type

$ svn co https://svn.typo3.org/TYPO3v4/Extensions/mm_forum/trunk/

onto the console to make a checkout of the current trunk or

$ svn co https://svn.typo3.org/TYPO3v4/Extensions/mm_forum/tags/0.1.7

to get the last stable version. Using a Windows, you can just enter one of the Repository URLs above into a SVN client of your choice (like for example SmartSVN or Tortoise).

If you wish to join the development of the mm_forum extension, please do not hesitate to contact us.