Rego’s Everyday Life

Forums in TYPO3

As part of the Mancomún project we need to use a forum with the next features:

• Anonymous users
• Captcha prevention
• RSS
• BBCode

So I’ve been testing different TYPO3 extensions:

• mm_forum: The most used and with community and recent activity. Only one problem not logged users can’t write posts.
• chc_forum: Not updated since 2006. Without Captcha prevention. RSS feed is added with another extension.
• wec_discussion: An active extension, but with a forum system quite simple and without BBCode support.

All of them miss some of the required features. After some tests I decided to use chc_forum, mainly because we’ve already used it in a previous project and another extension already provides Captcha prevention, but it’s not working properly.

I’d prefer to use mm_forum but it was more difficult to add the missed feature. I’ve added a new issue and I hope that this feature will be implemented in order to improve this great extension.

Finally, the result is:

• A new TYPO3 extension chc_forum_captcha, based on chc_forum_popup source code, that adds Captcha prevention to chc_forum.
• A little patch for chc_forum_feed, because it was not detecting the website protocol (HTTP or HTTPS).

gl_pages_cat: Pages categorization in TYPO3

gl_pages_cat is a TYPO3 extension that allows to relate TYPO3 pages with categories from tt_news_cat table. In that way, you’ll only have a category tree common for the whole website, pages and news are going to share the same categories.

At the beginning this extension just provided a method that returns the news related with the categories of the current page. It was enough for me, because of I was doing news lists from Formidable.

But now, it also provides a new method that returns the categories of the current page. With this method, for example, you can assign some categories to a page and, then, configure properly tt_news plugins to show only news related with the categories of that page. You could do something like that with the next TypoScript code:

includeLibs.user_pages_cat = EXT:gl_pages_cat/class.tx_glpagescat_div.php

lib.page.category = USER
lib.page.category.preUserFunc = tx_glpagescat_div->getPageCategories

plugin.tt_news.categorySelection < lib.page.category
plugin.tt_news.categoryMode = 1

I'm very grateful to Daniel Huf for having tested my extension and having given me his feedback (this TypoScript configuration). Thanks to this, the extension has improved and, from my point of view, now it's very useful combined with tt_news plugins.

For example, if you have a categorized TYPO3 website, once you have everything configured properly, you could change the news displayed on a page simply by changing the categories of the page.