I was reading some of the blogs over on the DotNetNuke site today and of course I pay close attention to anything regarding forums. The DNN Forum Project has been trying to catch up to Active Forums for quite some time. Their next release is going to have many features that you saw first in Active Forums. That being said, I found one of the comments to a blog post very interesting:
I don't understand why each and every forum module now gets those non forum features like private messagin, polls, or user profiles. There might be a need for such things in apps like commmunity server where the whole app is build around a forum. A DotnetNuke forum module is part of a framework where modules for handling polls, messaging on profiles are already in place and can be easily used by the forum module. Adding all that stuff only adds more bug potential and usability issues I believe. I was hoping for the forum module to not take that route that Active Forums is taking as well since its last releases.
I want to address each feature that the author of this comment mentioned.
1. Private Messaging - Active Forums doesn't include Private Messaging. Why? Because there isn't any need. There are already two great modules that provide you with Private Messaging capabilities which integrate perfectly with Active Forums. These are stand-alone modules that give you the ability to incorporate Private Messaging anywhere within your site, not just within the context of the forums module, as you will see with the new Core Forums. That doesn't mean we will not offer private messaging in the future, but if and when we do, it will be an add-on module that compliments Active Forums.
2. Polls - The ability to create topics with polls built-in was added to Active Forums in version 3.5. There are several reasons why we added this capability. Mainly, customers asked for a polling feature. Also, no other DotNetNuke module gives you the ability to quickly and easily allow your visitors to create polls within your site.
3. Profiles - Active Forums was first released for DotNetNuke 2.0. This was over 3 years go. At that time, DotNetNuke didn't have much of a profile option. Active Forums provided with an easy way for your users to create and manage a profile that could be viewed by others within your site. Since that time, DotNetNuke has had 3 major overhauls to the core profile system. Still, the profile system within the Core is not designed for retrieving or browsing the information as a whole. Ever noticed how slow it can be to page or search through users from the User Management page? That doesn't mean the core profile system is poorly designed or not written well. It simply means that the method in which the data is stored is not ideal for retrieval of multiple sets of data, which Active Forums needs (along with other modules). We could integrate with completely with the Core Profile system, but at the huge expense of database performance, which we are not willing to sacrifice.
When should we stop adding features? Are there features we should remove? Of course, these are "trick questions", but I would really like to get some comments from other customers.
Thanks,
Will