eXo Forum Terms

eXo Forum Terms

1 Main Screen

2 Basic Concepts

2.1 What is a Category?

A Category is the name for a collection of content items that are related in some way. In eXo Forum, a Category can be defined as a domain including various forums which may be related to the same field.

A Forum application may include various discussing domains so that it may also include various Categories.

2.2 What is a Forum?

A Forum is a web application holding on-line discussions and posting user generated content. Thus, a Forum is the best place to ask questions about certain development topics.

2.3 What is a Topic?

A Topic is the subject matter of a conversation or discussion in a Forum. Each Topic contains one original message and all its replies. When you enter a Forum, there is a list of Topics which are being discussed.

2.4 What is a Post?

A reply is a Post in a topic. With a message in the topic which you interest, you can read and have any reply if you want. Thus, a reply is your idea about that topic.

3 User Roles

3.1 Administrator

Users in the Administrator group are users who have the highest permission that allows them to manage members in the forum and set permissions for members. The administrators manage all the technical matters required to running Forum. As such, an administrator have the right to manage members can set specific rights for members. Users in the administrator group also have the right to create, edit, delete, move and modify, lock/unlock, etc any forum and its topics, posts.

At the runtime of the Forum service, the default Administrators, Categories and Forums are created. These Administrators are defined at the Forum Roles Plugin in xml file. These Administrators can be changed if the value in xml file is changed.

The default Administrators are the ones who initialize the Forum and assign role to normal users. A normal user can be the Administrator if the default Administrator assigns directly the administration role to him in the Forum application.

3.2 Moderator

Moderators have a subset of Administrator's permissions that allows them to edit, delete and move topics in a special Forum which they have the Moderation permission. Otherwise, the Moderators also can open/close, lock/unlock, stick/un-stick, split/merge or approve/disapprove topics in a special Forum. The Moderators monitor the interchange of users and makes decisions regarding content and the direction of threads. Moving discussions from one category to another to keep topics organized is also a common job of a forum Moderator.

When the Administrators create a new Forum, they have to set this permission to some users or some groups. If they don't set this permission to another user, only the Administrator can mange that Forum.

3.3 Normal users

Normal users include guests and logged users. Guests have only the view permission while logged users can take some basic actions in the Forum application. By default, all users can view forum, all its topics and replies.

However, if the Administrator only set the view permission for some users or some groups to specific categories, forums or topics, only the users or the groups having the view permission can view them. When users have adding post permission, they can add their replies to the topics that they interest.