Summary

In this chapter we've built a forums system from scratch, and we did it by leveraging much of the work done in earlier chapters, and many of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0. This was a further example showing how to integrate the built-in membership and profile systems into a custom module, as well as reusing other pages and controls (such as the RssReader control) developed previously. Our forums module supports multiple subforums, with optional moderation; it lists threads and replies through custom pagination (with different sorting options), offers support for publishing and consuming standard RSS feeds, and extends the user profiles with forum-specific properties. We also created administration features for deleting, editing, approving, moving, and closing threads and posts. This is a fairly complete forums module that should work well with many small to mid-size sites. However, the subject of user forums in general is a big area, and there are many possible options and features that you might want to consider adding to your forums module. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• Add support for some open forums, as a subforum-level option, which would be accessible by anonymous posters.

• Allow some subforums to have different moderators for more granular security control (especially useful for larger sites that may have multiple moderators who specialize in certain subforums).

• Add e-mail notification of new forum activity, or you can even send out e-mail message digests. E-mails could also be used by moderators to be notified about new messages waiting to be approved, and you might even allow the moderator to approve a message simply by clicking a link contained in the e-mail, after reviewing the post's body, also included in the e-mail.

• Support a list of banned words, and use regular expressions to replace them with acceptable alternatives, or maybe just a generic "###" pattern. Or, you can just tag offending messages for moderation, even if the forum is not a moderated forum (would require a little more work on the plumbing).

• Add private forums, whereby members can send each other messages, but each member can only read messages that were specifically addressed to them. This is a handy way to encourage people to communicate with each other, while allowing them to keep their own personal e-mail address hidden from other users (which is often desirable as a means of limiting spam). To make this easier to use, whenever you see the username of someone who posted a message in a forum, that username could have a link to another page that gives you the option to send that user a private message. To ensure that she will read your message, you could add an automatic check for private messages that would occur each time a registered user logs in.

• Implement a search feature to enable users to locate messages containing certain words or phrases.

• Let members upload their own attachments, which would be accessed from a link in a forum message (be sure to make this an option, because some site owners may not like this idea for security and bandwidth reasons). You could allow configurable filename extensions (disallowing .exe, .bat, .vbs, etc., but allowing .doc, .txt, etc.), and a configurable limit on allowable file size. You might also want to force any messages containing an attachment to be moderated so a power user can review the attachment before allowing it (this is especially important if you want to allow images to be uploaded).

There are numerous very complex and complete forums systems for ASP.NET, and many of them are free. You might want to use one of them if the simple forums module presented here doesn't meet your needs, or you might just want to study the others to get ideas for features you might want to add to your own forum module. One of the best, and most feature-rich, forums modules for ASP.NET is the Community Server, available at www.communityserver.org. This is 100% free for non-profit sites, and fairly inexpensive for use on commercial sites. This is the same forums module used by the famous www.asp.net site, Microsoft's official ASP.NET developer site. But don't be too quick to discard the forums module developed in this chapter, because even though it's missing some of the more advanced features, it still has several big benefits, including the fact that it's already integrated with the site's common layout and membership system (while others do not, unless you modify them, as they need to be installed on a separate virtual folder that makes it more difficult to share pieces of the parent site); it uses many of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0; and it is fairly easy to maintain and understand.

In the next chapter we'll implement another common requirement in a modern, full-featured web site: an e-commerce store with support for real-time electronic payments.