Hi all,

I'm moving a small supporters' board (about 60 members, football club in the Eastern Cape, South Africa) from an old phpBB 2 install to XMB 1.10.07. The upgrade itself went fine on PHP 8.3, so thanks for keeping this going.

Two things I could not work out from the docs:

1. I want one forum where only moderators can start threads (one thread per match), but every member can reply with score predictions. Is that possible with the forum permissions in 1.10, or do I need a separate private forum plus something else?

2. Each match thread starts with a small fixtures/results table, roughly 8 rows and 5 columns. Is there any table BBCode in 1.10, or is the usual way to allow HTML in that one forum only? I would rather not open HTML to everyone.

Any pointers welcome. Cheers.

In the forum options we definitely have permissions for starting threads. In other words, the admin/forums.php page has a "More Options" link for each forum.

The option to allow raw HTML in posts has been removed. That feature wasn't implemented in a way that made sense to me. For example, we wouldn't want moderators to have control over client scripting, but that policy wasn't enforced.

Use of a table tag would require some custom code.

Thanks miqrogroove, that sorted the first one. I found the "More Options" link for the match forum, set new threads to staff only and left replies open to members. That is exactly the setup I was after.

On the table, no HTML is fair enough, I'd rather not have scripts in posts either. The fixtures and results are already kept up to date on the Chippa United FC site, so for now each match thread will have the date, opponent and kick-off as a short list in [code] for alignment, with the full table linked rather than pasted. If I ever write a small table tag for our install I'll post it here in case someone else wants it.

Cheers again for the quick answer.

We haven't started work on a plugin system yet. There are several possible strategies for modifying the PHP to either add to bbcode or to pull data from somewhere else in the database and display it.

If you want moderators to be able to paste table-formatted text without too much fuss, one of the better options might be to add one of the open source Markdown parsers and let the moderators go to town with that because it's more powerful than bbcode, and still avoids HTML.

If you're going to do this the BBCode table tag way: one thing I'd suggest is adding the relevant CSS/HTML classes from the board templates, so that they look like part of the native forum UI no matter what theme your users are using.

I did try to have a look at it but I ran into some issues:
- Handling things like 'colspan' literally requires creating two separate tags in the bbcode array, rather than being able to have 'subclass tags' if you will, which feels incredibly counter-productive (and against the established standard of XMB) - unless I'm missing something incredibly stupid
- It'd be easy to break the board layout without special handling for tables
- The 'BBCode Helper' in the FAQ is statically generated, therefore it'd need to be manually updated for every single language (which in OP's case, it may pose a real issue)

Ideally, the HTML output would be something like this, though things may change for 1.12 - substituting dynamic variables for the raw output displayed below. This is just an idea of what the table looks like.

Code:

<table width="97%" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#bb81bb"> <tbody><tr> <td> <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="5px" cellspacing="1px"> <tbody><tr bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <td colspan="3" class="category"><div align="left"><font color="#3e223e"><strong>DERP</strong></font></div></td> </tr> <tr bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="tablerow">big blarg</td> <td bgcolor="#f9f4f9" class="tablerow">blarg</td> </tr> <tr bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <td colspan="2" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="tablerow">very big blarg</td> </tr></tbody></table>

(I'm probably just in yet another state of personal fecklessness when it comes to doing literally anything with XMB, but I do think the BBCode parser could do with some revamping to be faster/easier to maintain, especially with the upcoming systems being planned.)