Well, I haven't had much time this past week or so to work on anything involving the Forum project. I did, however, want to show a glimpse of what I did just before that after getting the permissions in check. Based on community feedback one of the biggest issues with this module is email notifications. This is actually divided into two seperate major enhancements, one of which I began now as its the easiest.
From the Forum Administration Control Panel you can now see how Gallery/Smiles has become Avatars, and there are two new areas: Email Settings, Templates.
The Gallery/Smiles is replaced as the html provider now offers smiley images and I wanted to remove the gallery project integration with this module as I feel it is hurting both modules at this time. If I want to integrate them later, it needs to be done using Inter Module Communication (IMC) to be done properly.
The Email settings section was broken out from General Settings and all email related items are now set from here. This was seperated to begin part of the next major step in this enhancement to the notification system, and won't make too much sense for the next release.
The Templates section is something that will basically not do much of anything at this time but will allow you to access email templates to edit. When editing an email template, you will see a screen like below:
The email template editing from here will replace the current xml file that must be changed. This also allows you to change it not only much easier, but allows each portal to specify what they want. There is a series of defaults, which are currently in the file based system, which will be populated for each portal when a forum module is first created for it. I haven't figured out how I am going to incorporate localization into this at this time and is beyond the scope of the next release. One thing you should note is I have 19 different defaults per portal that are different emailed messages from the forum module. These all will not be used in this next release, but are here so ensure compatibility in the future when they are exposed.
One thing not seen in the above picture is the keyword rendering legend. I am in the middle of architecting a solution which will allow keywords to be restricted to certain templates as well as offer room for easy enhancement/expansion in the future.