practical liferay Java -based Portal Applications development apress phần 5 pptx

Chapter 4 ■ CREATING DISCUSSION FORUMS 123

• User Ranks

• RSS

• Anonymous Postings

• Ratings

Let us now look at these options in depth.

Email From

The Email From option allows you to configure the e-mail settings of your notification mes￾sages. The corresponding tabbed screen is shown in Figure 4-22.

Figure 4-22. Configuring the e‑mail format for the Email From notification

Here, you need to enter the name and e‑mail address of the message sender. Mark the

HTML Format check box if you want to format the message in HTML. The screen also displays

the list of definitions used in your message.

Message Added Email

The Message Added Email option allows you to set the default format for the notification mes￾sage that goes to subscribers when a new message is posted to the forum.

You can define the Subject, Body, and Signature for the message. Liferay offers some pre￾defined terms you can use for these three fields, but you can choose to exclude them from

124 Chapter 4 ■ CREATING DISCUSSION FORUMS

your custom-formatted message. You can also type arbitrary text around the defined terms to

further customize the message.

Message Updated Email

The Message Updated Email option functions like the Message Added Email option. It allows

you to set the default format for the notification message that goes to subscribers when an

existing forum message has been updated.

Thread Priorities

The Message Boards application defines three priorities in the Thread Priorities screen: Urgent,

Sticky, and Announcement (see Figure 4-23).

Figure 4-23. Setting priority levels for threads

Depending on importance, priority levels are set from 1 to 3. Urgent is assigned the high￾est priority level (3.0) while Announcement has the lowest priority level (1.0). For each priority

name, a URL for an image is assigned. This image gives users a visual clue regarding the mes￾sage priority.

Chapter 4 ■ CREATING DISCUSSION FORUMS 125

You are free to redefine these priority levels. For example, you might decide to create

more priority levels ranging from 1 to 5, or even 1 to 10. Edit the displayed boxes to modify the

predefined priority levels and to add new ones. You can also select the localized language of

your choice from the drop-down list and perform the additional step of translating the text for

the thread-priority levels into that language.

Once you are done with your editing, click the Save button to save your changes. You and

your users will then be able to apply these priorities to newly created messages.

User Ranks

It is always a good practice to rank the users who post to your forum. Such ranking is typically

assigned based on the number of postings made by the user.

The Message Boards application provides a set of predefined ranks, which include these:

• Youngling=0

• Padawan=25

• Jedi Knight=100

• Jedi Master=250

Each rank name is listed with the number of postings required to achieve that rank. For

example, a newbie is assigned the Youngling rank. When a user makes 25 postings to the

forum, he achieves the Padawan rank. After 100 postings, the Jedi Knight rank is assigned, and

so on. You can modify the rank names as well as the number of required postings to create

your own ranking system. You can also add more ranking levels of your own.

In addition to the ranks for community users, Message Boards also supplies several pre￾defined ranks for forum moderators. As you can do with thread priorities, you can select a

localized language and translate the ranking text into this newly selected language.

RSS

In the “Category Actions” section toward the beginning of this chapter, you saw that it was

possible to view forum postings in RSS format. The RSS tabbed menu allows you to set defaults

for your RSS feed, such as the maximum number of items to display, the display style, and the

format.

You can display between 1 and 100 items in your RSS feed by making the appropriate

selection from the drop-down list. The numbers initially increment by a factor of 1, then by 5,

and finally by 10.

For your RSS-feed display style, you have three choices: full content, abstract, and title. If

you decide to use a small number as your maximum, you’ll have space to display full content

in the feed. If you use a large number, you might want to display the title only. For in-between

cases, display the abstract.

Finally, you have three choices for the feed format: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0.

nTip If you are interested, you can read more about RSS formats in Wikipedia.