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For those of you old enough, you might be humming a tune in your head right now, one of the more pop-flavored releases by the 80’s band “Talk Talk”.  And now my abrupt segue into Talking.

We like to talk.  Online communities thrive when people of similar interests find ways to talk to one another effectively.  Discussion forums are a natural product of that desire.  This is great in situations where conversations are the best way to communicate the information we desire.  But at times there’s a need for greater structure, something more akin to a reference, but still one that grows from the vast knowledge of people with similar interests and varying levels of skill.  Hence, the wiki model.  Wikipedia is so successful (in terms of contribution anyway) because people who are deeply interested in a topic are given a sense of ownership of the content, and strive to make it the best it can be.

But wikis do a poor job with the former type of communicating, the conversational variety.  And as a glance at any of the Wikipedia discussion pages shows, there is a close tie to the quality of the content with the participation in the discussions.  But blech, it’s just another article, editable by anyone, cleverly disguised as a discussion with headings, indenting, and a table of contents.  Why don’t wikis let us talk with the sophistication of a discussion forum?  Thanks to ExpressionEngine’s extensible nature, the wiki and forum modules can talk, and now, so can you.

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Derek,

This is a brilliant idea, and I’ve already used it in the EE Wiki! One suggestion since I know that you aren’t busy. 😊

If a thread doesn’t already exist for a wiki entry, the link takes you to a post submission form instead of a thread. This is how it should be. However, the text in the link at the bottom of the article should say something like “Start the discussion on this article” instead of just “Discuss Article.” That way it would be clear that there is no existing discussion.

I am, of course, thrilled by this!

My only disappointment is that I have just started a two weeks business trip and I daren’t attempt an install over the WiFi connection in the train 😠  I can’t wait to be back in the office. Of course this is none of your fault! Many thanks for your support and interest!
I’ll buy and install the forum module and the new software shortly. You’ll hear from me then 😊

Your comment on users of Wikipedia learning to live within the limitation of their system is very real… and then everybody else blindly reproduces the same limitations so many, many thanks for approaching this discussion with an open mind.

I recall that when we looked for a new platform for Déclencheur, I had just assume that there must be dozen of products out there offering blog + wiki + commerce + social network + photo gallery +... i.e. all the tools that one needs in an integrated product. I mean so many large sites offer all of those services so it stands to reason that an integrated solution must exist. No, it’s not. Mostly it has been integrated the painful way.

EE really is breaking new ground by integrating all of these modules.

Side note: you need to get EE marketing to work on the baseline.
“Publish your universe!” is way too restrictive for what the software does now 😉

Do you think? I couldn’t think of a better slogan, your “universe” consisting of all kinds of content, text, articles, forums, gallery, wiki, what have you, all seamlessly integrated. I find it quite fitting.

Do you think? I couldn’t think of a better slogan, your “universe” consisting of all kinds of content, text, articles, forums, gallery, wiki, what have you, all seamlessly integrated. I find it quite fitting.

You are right, my note is not fair. I forgot to insert a smiley: I intended the note more as joke complimenting how broad EE is (since it’s larger than your universe!) than as a negative comment on EE marketing. I probably shouldn’t have attempted that in an international context, moderator feel free to delete my poor attempt at humour.

And now that you make me think… it’s the “you” that introduces a restriction. It’s a great slogan for a blogging platform but when you add forums and wikis… (i.e. community-based sites), honestly I think EE goes way beyond what the slogan implies.

Ah, irony 😊 To which I say:

Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick: Yes, it’s like goldy and bronzy only it’s made out of iron.

Great idea Derek!

I just used the feature myself and posted a comment to a Wiki issue that I had problems with. When I searched for the problem, nothing came up, so in my post I used the terms that I had searched for. Will this now be searchable and found in the future so that it may help someone who has the same issue and uses the same search terms??

Specifically, here is my Wiki post below:

I was having trouble with my NAVIGATION (I just put that in bold as I searched this Wiki for “navigation” and it came up with nothing helpful, so hopefully this entry might help others in the future) when installing EE.

First of all, my host is GoDaddy.com and during a re-installation I ran the Install Wizard and it stated that everything was fine and supported EXCEPT “url segment support”. GoDaddy.com’s tech support had not heard this term used before and therefore could not help me with the issue.

After some more research, I found that this info on the EE site about “Force URL query strings” located here: (http://expressionengine.com/docs/cp/admin/system_preferences/output_and_debugging_preferences.html):

Setting this to “Yes” will force the system to use a standard query string in all your URLs like this:

http://www.example.com/index.php?/blog/joe/ (notice the question mark).

When set to “No”, the system uses a more search-engine friendly format similar to:

http://www.example.com/index.php/blog/joe/

The majority of servers will be able to use the default (“No”) method, which is almost universally preferred by users. Some Windows servers (and very occasionally other types) do not support this feature and will have to be set to “Yes”. You’ll know if this affects you if none of your links seem to work.

In addition, some people will need to use this variable in conjunction with editing the $qtype variable in your main site index.php file.

I had to change the setting to “Yes” and set the $qtype variable in the index.php file to “2” and now the default EE template is navigable. YAY!

I just thought I’d let you know this in case you or someone else has this come up in the future.

Otherwise, Im loving EE. Thanks!

Just some suggestions and questions. Could this function be modified to display the forum posts as “comments” in the wiki “talk page” as well as in content articles? That way, users reading an article can also see the discussion at the bottom of the page.

Well, all things are possible, ncknight, but if you wanted to mimic everything that the forum module does for viewing threads, you’d have quite a bit of code duplication, and I think most would find that distracting to display right with the wiki article.

Maybe pooling the last 2/3 messages to entice a click on the discussion page?

Based on some early feedback, I’ve tweaked it a bit for our site, and after using our site as a proving ground, I’ll roll it into the extension for download.  In our theme, I’ve placed the discussion link at both the top and bottom of the article to make it more visible, and I’ve modified it to indicate whether a discussion has started already or not, and if so how many comments have been made.

Can’t wait to get back to the office. This is looking better by the day!

Back at my desk at long last!
I have bought and installed the forum module and I’m about to install the extension. I understand that you have a new version of the extension. Apparently (looking at the dates) it’s not published yet. Could you tell me when you intend to make it available? I’d rather install the improved version straight away.

Thanks

They were very minor changes, so it’s already rolled into the 1.0 download, Benoît; the download is the current version we are using here.  I did, however, update the instructions to include the use of the new conditionals and variables.