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Written for the Community, by the Community

The Future of Active Forums and a New Release!

Written By Will Strohl
2020-11-17

Photo Credit: Clint Patterson

First and foremost, I'm pleased to be able to announce that there is a new version of Active Forums available.  It's been a couple of weeks in the making, or months if you consider some of the details in this blog post.  There were several people in the community that chipped in to make this release possible as well, so I'm extra excited about this release.  

Active Forums vs. Community Forums

The original repository for the source code of Active Forums is still alive, but none of us that are wanting to help maintain the source code have any level of meaningful access to do this successfully long-term.  All attempts to get access were unsuccessful.  Keeping this in mind, a decision had to be made... 

At the leadership level, we decided months ago that we needed to fork the repository to give our community a path forward.  This was especially important since this very website depends on this popular forums module.  Thanks goes to Peter Donker for forking and putting Active Forums into a new location that's available for the entire community to maintain.  This effectively makes the Active Forums module the "official" forums module for the community.  

Visit the DNN Community Forums source code repository

Moving forward, the only thing that's changed is the location of the source code.  The name of the module and how you install/upgrade remains the same.  So, if you're currently running an older version of Active Forums, just grab the most recent release and then upgrade like you do with any other module.  Yay!  

Active Forums 06.04.00 Marks a Major Milestone

The catalyst for updating Active Forums this time around was to remove any dependencies it had on Telerik.  Luckily for us, the dependencies this module had on Active Forums were quite simple to remove.  But, you can now rest easy knowing that Active Forums is DNN 9.8+ friendly and doesn't use Telerik at all.  

There were several other updates contributed by multiple community members.  

  • The minimum supported version of DNN is 9.4.0.  You should expect that version to be raised again in the near future.  
  • John Henley submitted a fix for resolving an issue with friendly URLs.  He even ported that fix to the new repo from the old one.  Thanks for your help, John!  (Issue 342)
  • Timo Breumelhof resolved an issue where like icons would be repeated.  (Issue 449)
  • Timo Breumelhof resolved an issue where links were not being correctly parsed in posts.  (Issue 437)
  • Peter Schotman added translations that will help Dutch websites.  

We also spent a great deal of time fixing and improving how this module is worked with for the source code and builds.  It seems that there were several missing files that were caught up in typical Git ignore scenarios (and other issues).  

Download Active Forums 6.4

I know many of you also tested this release, as it had 4 release candidates.  I know Daniel Valadas and Michael Onizuka did some testing.  Thank you, all!  

(By the way, if I missed thanking anyone else, it's not intentional... Thank you too!)  

Working with the Source Code

If you wish to help with this module now, it's super easy.  Just install the minimum version of DNN, then check out the source code to the appropriate DesktopModules folder.  An example path is illustrated below.  

C:\Websites\DNN-940\website\DesktopModules\ActiveForums\

Your first step at this point will be to build in Debug mode just to be sure it's building okay. 

Then, build in release mode to create the install packages.  This will create an install package for the module itself and another for installing symbols for troubleshooting issues on other sites.  You can find the install packages in the standard install folder DNN uses.  Keeping the previous file path example in mind, that may look like this:

C:\Websites\DNN-940\website\Install\Module\

On the same website, go to the Extensions view as a superuser and install the Active Forums module using the Available Extensions tab.  This will properly register the module into DNN and run the required SQL scripts. 

Once this is done, you're ready to begin development!  

Photo credit goes to our very own superstar photographer, Clint Patterson.  You thought I was going to say Mark Saunders, huh?  Ha!  

Total: 2 Comment(s)
Great DNN Community effort Will - thanks for spearheading this and doing a great deal of work yourself on this! Oh, and great photo Clint Patterson! Are you like a famous photographer now or something?!?! :)
Tuesday, November 17, 2020 ·
I updated the urls in the /forge as well. Many thanks, all!
Wednesday, November 18, 2020 ·

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