It was missing. Users wanted it. And the “Blog” and “Wiki” buttons really needed another companion: today we added a Forums section to our Things pages.
The user forums are based on the open source Phorum software. We took some time to create a suitable template however. Forums around the internet have a tendency to look cluttered, which is why we tried to cut down everything to the essentials. One of the key design features is that, even when only briefly glancing, the user always knows which level of the hierarchy he or she is looking at:
- the list of all forums,
- the topic list of a selected forum, or
- the list of posts of a selected topic.
These three levels have a distinct look and feel without compromising the visual unity of the user forums as a whole. We also carefully made sure that the forums would fit in well with blog and wiki. We even redesigned the comments section of the blog to use the same visual approach as posts do in the forum.
Not every aspect is completely finished. In particular, users will need to create a new account for the forums even if they already have a Wiki account. The software for the Wiki (MediaWiki) and the Forums (Phorum) is completely different and it would have taken us much more time to write unified user management for both. We hope to be able to do it some time down the road. But the level of refinement should be more than sufficient for discussing everything Things.
Now who will be the one to create the first topic?