Django Forum

This is a basic forum application which is usable by itself as a standalone project and should eventually be usable as a pluggable application in any Django project.

• Features
  • Possible Misfeatures
• Installation
  • Dependencies
  • Standalone Mode
  • Pluggable Application Mode
• Settings
• Post Formatters
  • Post Formatter Structure

Features

• Bog-standard layout - Sections → Forums → Topics.

• Search posts and topics - search for keywords by section, forum, username, post type and date.

  Searching supports quoted phrases and + and - modifiers on keywords and phrases.

• Real-time tracking with Redis - performing UPDATE queries on every single page view to track view counts, active users and user activity on the forum? No.

  Redis does it in style.

• Configurable post formatting - comes with BBCode and Markdown formatters.

• Metaposts - each topic has regular posts, as you'd expect, and also metaposts. These are effectively a second thread of conversation for posts about the topic. Why, you say?

  People who want to talk about the topic itself or how it's being discussed, or just start a good old ding-dong with other users, rather than taking part in the discussion at hand, have a place to vent instead of dragging the topic into the realm of the off-topic.

  Moderators have another option other than deleting or hiding posts when topics start to take a turn for the worse in that direction.

  People who just wanted to read and post in the original topic can continue to do so and still have it out in the metaposts. Win/win or win/lose - the choice is yours.

  Inspired by my many years with the excellent people of RLLMUK.

• Avatar validation - linked avatars are validated for format, file size and dimensions.

Possible Misfeatures

• Denormalised up the yazoo - data such as post counts and last post information are maintained on all affected objects on every write.

  Trading write complexity and ease of maintenance against fewer, more simple reads, just because.

• No signatures - it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Installation

Dependencies

Required:

• Python Imaging Library (PIL) is required for validation of user avatars.
• pytz is required to perform timezone conversions based on the timezone registered users can choose as part of their forum profile.

Required for standalone mode:

• django-registration is used to perform registration and validation of new users when running as a standalone project - it is assumed that when the forum is integrated into existing projects, they will already have their own registration mechanism in place.

Required based on settings:

• Redis and redis-py are required for real-time tracking fun if FORUM_USE_REDIS is set to True. For Windows users, native Redis binaries are available.
• python-markdown2 is required to use forum.formatters.MarkdownFormatter to format posts using Markdown syntax.
• postmarkup and Pygments are required to use forum.formatters.BBCodeFormatter to format posts using BBCode syntax.

Others:

• Django Debug Toolbar will be used if available, if the forum is in standalone mode and DEBUG is set to True.

Standalone Mode

At the time of typing, the codebase comes with a complete development settings.py module which can be used to run the forum in standalone mode.

It's configured to to use Redis for real-time tracking on the forum and for session management using forum.sessions.redis_session_backend.

Pluggable Application Mode

Note: this mode has not yet been fully developed or tested

Add 'forum' to your application's INSTALLED_APPS setting, then run syncdb to create its tables.

Include the forum's URLConf in your project's main URLConf at whatever URL you like. For example:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

urlpatterns = patterns(
    (r'^forum/', include('forum.urls')),
)

The forum application's URLs are decoupled using Django's named URL patterns feature, so it doesn't mind which URL you mount it at.

Settings

The following settings may be added to your project's settings module to configure the forum application.

FORUM_STANDALONE

Default: False

Whether or not the forum is being used in standalone mode. If set to True, URL configurations for the django.contrib.admin and django-registration apps will be included in the application's main URLConf.

FORUM_USE_REDIS

Default: False

Whether or not the forum should use Redis to track real-time information such as topic view counts, active users and user locations on the forum.

If set to False, these details will not be displayed.

FORUM_REDIS_HOST

Default: 'localhost'

Redis host.

FORUM_REDIS_PORT

Default: 6379

Redis port.

FORUM_REDIS_DB

Default: 0

Redis database number, 0-16.

FORUM_POST_FORMATTER

Default: 'forum.formatters.PostFormatter'

The Python path to the module to be used to format raw post input. This class should satisfy the requirements defined below in Post Formatter Structure.

FORUM_DEFAULT_POSTS_PER_PAGE

Default: 20

The number of posts which are displayed by default on any page where posts are listed - this applies to registered users who do not choose to override the number of posts per page and to anonymous users.

FORUM_DEFAULT_TOPICS_PER_PAGE

Default: 30

The number of topics which are displayed by default on any page where topics are listed - this applies to registered users who do not choose to override the number of topics per page and to anonymous users.

FORUM_MAX_AVATAR_FILESIZE

Default: 512 * 1024 (512 kB)

The maximum allowable filesize for user avatars, specified in bytes. To disable validation of user avatar filesizes, set this setting to None.

FORUM_ALLOWED_AVATAR_FORMATS

Default: ('GIF', 'JPEG', 'PNG')

A tuple of allowed image formats for user avatars. To disable validation of user avatar image formats, set this setting to None.

FORUM_MAX_AVATAR_DIMENSIONS

Default: (64, 64)

A two-tuple, (width, height), of maximum allowable dimensions for user avatars. To disable validation of user avatar dimensions, set this setting to None.

FORUM_FORCE_AVATAR_DIMENSIONS

Default: True

Whether or not <img> tags created for user avatars should include width and height attributes to force all avatars to be displayed with the dimensions specified in the FORUM_MAX_AVATAR_DIMENSIONS setting.

FORUM_EMOTICONS

Default:

{':angry:':    'angry.gif',
 ':blink:':    'blink.gif',
 ':D':         'grin.gif',
 ':huh:':      'huh.gif',
 ':lol:':      'lol.gif',
 ':o':         'ohmy.gif',
 ':ph34r:':    'ph34r.gif',
 ':rolleyes:': 'rolleyes.gif',
 ':(':         'sad.gif',
 ':)':         'smile.gif',
 ':p':         'tongue.gif',
 ':unsure:':   'unsure.gif',
 ':wacko:':    'wacko.gif',
 ';)':         'wink.gif',
 ':wub:':      'wub.gif'}

A dict mapping emoticon symbols to the filenames of images they should be replaced with when emoticons are enabled while formatting posts. Images should be placed in media/img/emticons.

Post Formatters

Post formatting classes are responsible for taking raw input entered by forum users and transforming and escaping it for display, as well as performing any other operations which are dependent on the post formatting syntax being used.

The following post formatting classes are bundled with the forum application:

• forum.formatters.PostFormatter
• forum.formatters.MarkdownFormatter
• forum.formatters.BBCodeFormatter

Post Formatter Structure

When creating a custom post formatting class, you should subclass forum.formatters.PostFormatter and override the following:

QUICK_HELP_TEMPLATE

This class-level attribute should specify the location of a template providing quick help, suitable for embedding into posting pages.

FULL_HELP_TEMPLATE

This class-level attribute should specify the location of a template file providing detailed help, suitable for embedding in a standalone page.

format_post_body(body)

This method should accept raw post text input by the user, returning a version of it which has been transformed and escaped for display. It is important that the output of this function has been made safe for direct inclusion in templates, as no further escaping will be performed.

For example, given the raw post text:

[quote]T
<es>
t![/quote]

...a BBCode post formatter might return something like:

<blockquote>T<br>
&lt;es&gt;<br>
t!</blockquote>

quote_post(post)

This method should accept a Post object and return the raw post text for a a "quoted" version of the post's content. The Post object itself is passed, as opposed to just the raw post text, as the quote may wish to include other details such as the name of the user who made the post, the time the post was made at, a link back to the quoted post... and so on.

Note that the raw post text returned by this function will be escaped when it is displayed to the user for editing, so to avoid double escaping it should not be escaped by this function.

For example, given a Post whose raw body text is:

T<es>t!

...a BBCode post formatter might return something like:

[quote]T<es>t![/quote]