Thread

Prior to EE1.6/Forums2.0 the forums were unified and we differentiated access using permissions.

Now that we have Forum Boards:

1. Is access limited by site as well as by permissions?

2. Is there a way to move a pre-existing forum (prior to 1.6/2.0) from one board to another?

For 1- I’m not dead sure what you mean.  The permissions work like they do now- based on member group and moderator/etc. status.  That’s shared across sites.  Er- can you give me an example of what you’re talking about on that one?

As for 2- I’m still digging.  Not seeing a default way to do it, but I could be missing it.  And even if I’m not- I’m thinking there has to be a way to do it.

1. Is access limited by site as well as by permissions?

From the documentation://

If the Multiple Site Manager is installed, this allows you to determine which Site the forum board belongs to.

So my question is whether “belongs to” means “can be access-restricted to?”  Let’s say I have two sites. Site 1 is password controlled, but Site 2 is not. Does the fact that a Forum Board “belongs to” Site 1 mean that Site 2 cannot see it even if the user group permissions are set so that it can?

Maybe I don’t understand what “belongs to” means.

The permissions work like they do now- based on member group and moderator/etc. status.  That’s shared across sites.

Yes, but .... settings are supposed to be site-specific under MSM, so the question comes down to whether site-specific settings also apply to Forum Boards when they “belong to” a Site.

Thanks for looking into Item 2 - I sincerely want there to be a way, but whether or not being able to do so is a problem depends on the answer to item 1. If I have (rashly) extracted a client site via MSM and am unable to extract their forums into a separate Board then the fact that the forum “belongs to” the default site may become a problem. This would not have been a problem under 1.5 because the forum access was completely determined by the permissions. If this is still the case, then no problem, but then this would be a case where settings are NOT site specific.

I am also wondering how permanent the Board to Forum(s) relationship is. I have not been able to find any way to reassign a forum to a different Board - but that’s really another route back to the original question.

I read with some concern in the documentation relating to Boards that

This link will delete the board and all forum data contained within it.

Is this the same as deleting the forum itself?

John, perhaps an example will help?  See these forums? Now go to codeigniter.com.  See those forums?  Forum boards belonging to sites - at work.  Does that help at all?

Does that help at all?

Not really because it is not clear how it was done. Did they start with one installation of the Forum Module (like me) with a number of Categories/Forums in it, and did they then break it out somehow into Boards, or did they in fact have separate forum installations so they could just assign the existing Categories/Forums to Boards, or did they do it with aliases?

For that matter, if they originally had one EE/Forum software copy running all those forums, how did they separate them according to the different sites prior to 1.6/2.0?

That’s the kind of thing I would like to know.

Starting from scratch with 2.0 doing Boards and Aliases is a breeze and very powerful, but I have existing Forums with lots of posts that have to be preserved, so I can soldier on with the existing setup.

But it would be nice to be able to restructure the existing forums into separate boards.

As far as I am aware they were all separate sites. You might remember that we were down for a fair bit while they brought the 4 sites together.  If you have installations on separate sites in separate databases, then the merging is something that you will need to handle with great care and excellent MySQL knowledge.

I more meant in displaying how they work now as far as separate forum boards belonging to sites, not how they got there.  That should help to exemplify that to some extent.

So right now, can you just run-down your current situation? Are these separate databases/installs of EE, or are these one large forum in one install that you want to split off into their own boards (like the MSM Site creation lets you do with weblogs/templates?)

The situation with which I am concerned is one with a large forum in one install, that I want to split off into separate boards, like the MSM Site creation lets you do with weblogs/templates.

Ideally, you’d want a dropdown for the forum’s preferences that says “forum belongs to which forum board?” right?  I’ll have to ask if there’s someway I’m missing, but it may need a feature request.

Hi, John!

There is no built-in feature for this at this time.  However, after creating the new board, it should not be too difficult to create some queries to set the required data to the appropriate ID, this would also need to account for items like subscription information and attachments.  I would recommend that, unless you are comfortable with SQL, hiring someone from our Pro Network or a post on our job board on these forums would be best for getting an expert to help you with this.