This is a pre-release of version 3, which introduces many new features and improvements over version 2. Some parts of it may be broken and it's not well-optimised yet, but feel free to explore it. Full documentation will be published on teamteatime.net prior to the first stable release.

Please refer to the laravel-5 and laravel-4 branches for current stable versions.

Installation

Step 1: Install the package

Install the package via composer:

composer require riari/laravel-forum:~3.0

Then add the following service provider to your config/app.php:

'Riari\Forum\Providers\ForumServiceProvider',

Step 2: Publish the package files

Run the vendor:publish command to copy the controller, config, resources and migrations to your app's directories:

php artisan vendor:publish

Step 3: Update your database

Run your migrations:

php artisan migrate

Additional steps

Once the package is installed, provided you are logged in, you can visit /forum and start defining your category hierarchy using the "Create category" and "Category actions" panels:

Configuration

Several configuration files are published to your application's config directory, each prefixed with forum.. Refer to these for a variety of options for changing the behaviour of the forum and how it integrates with key parts of your application code.

You may need to modify the forum.integration.user_name config option according to your user model. This specifies which attribute on the user model should be used as a display name in the forum views.

Views

Views are published to resources/views/vendor/forum. The simplest way to integrate the forum with your existing design is to edit the master view, remove undesired markup and make it extend your application's main layout with @extends. Note that the master view does pull in jQuery and Bootstrap 3 by default, and includes some jQuery-based JavaScript to support some of the forum frontend features. You may wish to move it elsewhere or re-write it in your own way.

Translations

Laravel Forum currently supports 8 languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian and Swedish. The translation files are published to resources/lang/vendor/forum/{locale}. Please be aware that much of the translation work in 3.0 has been done using Google Translate and probably isn't accurate. Pull requests are welcome to rectify this.

Events

The package includes a variety of events for user interactions such as viewing threads. Refer to src/Events for a full list.

Policies (user permissions)

Permissions in 3.0 are handled via the Authorization features introduced in Laravel 5.1.11. Refer to src/Policies for a full list of policies. To override methods in a policy, just create a class extension for it somewhere in your application and change the corresponding namespace specified in the forum.integration.policies config array. You'll likely want to do this for the ForumPolicy and CategoryPolicy as a minimum to prevent your regular users from managing categories and threads!