WSN Forum Features

View Full Release Notes (lists all major features and fixes)

Overview of Major Features:

• Basic Features
• Social Networking Features
• SEO and Traffic-Building Features
• Revenue-Building Features
• Multilingual Features
• Customization Features
• E-mail Features
• File Attachment Features
• Topics-specific Features
• Forums-specific Features
• Membership-specific Features
• Search Features
• Administrative Features
• Advanced Developer Features
• More Features

Basic Features

• A responsive default theme which is ready for desktop, tablet and phone users. Passes google's mobile site test tool to achieve higher ranking in mobile search results.
• WSN Forum can automatically post topics from news feeds, ensuring a steady stream of topics to get your forum off the ground and attract replies. Choose a few feeds with an appropriate topic and watch your forum fill up.
• Automated updates. Never miss a security update, never waste time downloading and uploading files -- just let your site keep itself current.
• Well-maintained. Reported bugs are fixed promptly and maintenance releases are issued regularly. A change log is available.
• Setup takes seconds. The setup script asks for your database info, asks you which languages you wish to install, and then automatically sets up your web site for you. If desired, professional installation service is free.
• No branding required. If you don't want to advertise WSN Forum, just switch off the branding. You can even set a tweak to have the admin panel show your name instead of WSN's, making it a white label to use with your clients.
• Choose your complexity: simple, recommended or kitchen sink. You can pick and choose which features to enable with more detail in your switches later. The 'Switches' area in the admin panel allows turning features on and off instantly without needing to edit them out of the templates.
• Free support via email and forum. All support is handled by the script's author, not relayed through customer service reps who would lack sufficient knowledge of the software. Get help and advice with anything related to the script, not just troubleshooting.
• Available services. WSN offers a variety of services to help you complete and maintain your project.
• The full source code is provided, so you're never trapped and can always hire a third party to work on it. A guide to extending the source is available in the knowledge base.

Social Networking Features

• Automated tweeting of new topics.
• Select from a variety of social bookmarking options, including addthis, pinterest, google+ and facebook.
• WSN Forum includes a social feed wizard for displaying twitter feeds.
• Integrated facebook application version of your WSN Forum -- your own facebook app ready to go.
• Facebook Connect and Google Sign-In for one-click registrations and logins.
• OpenGraph tag generation.

SEO and Traffic-Building Features

• Search engine friendly URL rewriting. If you're on an apache server, shorten your URLs and introduce more keywords into them better search engine result poisitioning.
• WSN Forum impliments canonical tags where appropriate for SEO.
• Control search engine spiders by disallowing them from unimportant pages. This way they get deeper into the important areas and don't put as much of a load on your server.
• Throw 404s to any undesirable IPs in order to control rogue spiders or thwart DOS attacks.
• An option to serve noindex/nofollow to non-rewritten URLs, in order to concentrate spidering on the important stuff. Error pages automatically set a noindex,nofollow meta tag.
• Meta tags. Set meta tags for general use on all pages, and set forum-specific meta tags to override the general ones for each forum.
• Syndication. Have a javascript code generated based on a specified toplist so that other sites can syndicate your content.
• RSS feed. Provide an RSS feed to visitors, containing urls and descriptions ordered in any way you (or the visitor) likes. The RSS feed can also be used to track posts posted. Apply custom templates to feeds.
• Google and Sitemaps.org sitemap generation. Help search engines find your pages.
• Phone/browser push notifications to bring people back the moment you have new content.

Revenue-Building Features

• Member sponsorship. Allow members to pay for promotion to a more privileged usergroup, or require paid membership.
• WSN Forum's option for auto-renewing subscriptions for paypal payments makes it easier for people to keep paying you.
• Integrate your advertising code anywhere in the templates, and use the template conditionals syntax for control over when it appears.
• Google adsense generator included.
• Coupons system to offer discounted sponsorships.

Multilingual Features

• Translate into any language with the language system. Any character set can be used, utf-8 is the default.
• Language files can be searched and edited through the admin panel's language page, or by hand in a text editor if you prefer.
• A handy "show untranslated items" link tells you what you have left to translate.
• Enter topic and forum details in mutliple languages and show the visitor the version for their selected language.
• Localization settings: choose date formats, currency, kilometers vs. miles, time zone, default country and so on.

Customization Features

• More than a dozen additional themes included for one-click install. Find the one that looks closest to the site you want, and start customizing from there.
• WSN Forum is fully customizable. All of the HTML which is displayed to your visitors (as well the admin panel HTML) can be customized through the templates. You may either edit your templates offline through the HTML editor of your choice, or make use of the online editor in the admin panel which allows you to preview changes, view the original version of the template, et cetera.
• The custom pages system makes it easy to add new pages to your site, like an "about us" page.
• The style designer and color wizard make it easy to change your site's color scheme or style without having to learn CSS.
• Use the wrapper template to encapsulate the WSN Forum content in your design very quickly without needing to search through all the other templates.
• Add as many new fields as you like, no limits. Use a text area, input box, checkboxes, radio buttons, combo box, etc to collect your data. Choose if new fields can be filled in by visitors or only by admins.
• Create toplists. Anywhere you wish, list the top x topics (or posts, members, etc.) ordered by the field of your choice and filtered by a condition of your choice. Works in custom templates, so you can create new pages with toplist content. Use the simple toplist generator in your admin panel. Toplists can now be 'live' as well, automatically seemlessly refreshing their content every specified number of seconds.
• Simple conditionals syntax available in templates. Use the power of PHP without needing to learn PHP. Example: <IF {MEMBERSUBMISSIONS} is greater than 10>You have submitted more than 10 times.<OTHERWISE>You have not yet submitted more than 10 times. Come back and submit more.</IF>
• Know PHP? Use it in your templates for simple stuff, or take advantage of the powerful plugins and modifications system to add major new features without worrying about losing them on upgrades.

E-mail Features

• Bounced email detector. Run a utility to stop sending emails to addresses which have bounced messages back. This prevents your email server from being blacklisted by ISPs, and saves you server load too.
• E-mail queue system can handle sending out an email to tens of thousands of people at once.
• MIME e-mail option. Use HTML in your emails, with it still degrading to text effectively.
• E-mail logging. Review a list of sent emails and the IP addresses of the senders.
• Use the advanced toplist feature in emails, just as in any template.
• Preview emails before sending.
• Create an email signature that will be appended to the bottom of all mail sent.
• Create standard emails which you can select to re-send in the future.
• Bulk e-mail members. Send a mass e-mail to all members or to members who fit the conditions you specify, and use any member template variables in your message.
• Let members e-mail each other. These e-mails are processed through a form which does not reveal the address of the recipient.
• Allow members to opt in or out. By choosing on registration or editing their profile, members can decide not to receive emails from other members or not to receive emails from the administrator.
• E-mail notifications to admin. Get an email informing you of new submissions, containing details of the submission.
• E-mail notifications to user. Let the submitter get an email notification of acceptance or rejection. Optionally send submitter notification that their topic is received and pending review, that their sponsorship funds have run out, that their topic has expired, etc.
• Send emails from different addresses. If you want validation emails sent by your moderators to contain their email address, for example, this is selectable.
• Subscriptions. Subscribe to be notified of new posts, or subscribe to a forum to be notified of new topics in it. Members can also choose to be notified by email of every new topic, or those matching keywords. Member profiles offer a subscription management area.
• Option to add headers to outgoing emails coming from the admin address. Use this to set a reply-to value or the like.
• Option to send all email from the administrative address. A few hosting setups require that all mail be sent from the same domain.

File Attachment Features

• Visitors may attach however many files you specify, if you choose to allow it. The number of files per post or PM is configurable by usergroup. Set the allowed file types and maximum size. Track the number of downloads. Choose which member groups are allowed to download the file. If it's an image, automatically display it.
• A powerful uploader tool enabling numerous files to be uploaded at once with progress bars. Pure javascript, no flash needed. Simple plain HTML uploader also available as an option.
• Custom file attachment fields. Add unlimited file fields for topics, forums, posts, members. Track downloads, image size, etc for as many different file fields as you need.
• Show a thumbnail of any size for any image attachment.
• Show thumbnails for PDF files if you have ImageMagick.
• Resize images automatically on upload to fit your desired dimensions and avoid wasting disk space, without making submitters do any work.
• Show a lightbox-style slideshow of all attachments in a forum, or attachments on a topic.

Topics-Specific Features

• Bulk-edit all of the topics from a forum on one page, when it's helpful to speed things up.
• Topics can be automatically marked as visited, and associated posts threads as read.
• Create a list of related topics for each topic, or with MySQL 4 display an auto-generated list of topics similar to the one being viewed.
• Visitors can rate each topic. Cookies are used to prevent re-voting, and IPs are also stored to prevent the same IP address from voting again. View details of each individual vote cast, delete bad votes. Show mean or median rating.
• Custom rating fields. Let visitors rate as many different aspects of each topic as you like.
• Remote voting code generator. Let topic owners put a voting code on their site which will direct their visitors to you.
• Visitors can report a topic, email a topic, bookmark a topic, or add it to their personal list.
• Copy, or place in multiple forums. Copy a topic to another forum, or place it in secondary forums so it functions as one single topic in multiple forums at once.
• Create a custom formula to determine the importance of a topic (a standard formula is included) and sort by that value. Show the rank number of topics by this criteria.
• Limit submissions by usergroup. Set how many topics each usergroup can submit in total, and how many they can submit in each single day.
• Rate posts. Visitors can rate a particular post on a topic as helpful or unhelpful.
• An optional illiteracy detector, to force people to write post posts properly.
• An option to let topic owners respond to posts within them. This is especially useful when the posts are reviews, and the owner wishes to give their side of the story.
• Future effective date. Set topics to not appear until a certain date.

Forum-Specific Features

• An option to create search-based forums -- a forum dynamically populated with any topics from the rest of the site which match your criteria.
• Unlimited levels of subforums. If you need 1000 subforums 100 levels deep, it's not a problem.
• Select related forums to topic to from a particular forum, or show an automatically generated list of similar forums.
• For each individual forum, you may override the default topic order, choice of mixing topic types or not, and number of topic and subforum columns.
• Per-forum sponsorship settings.
• Forum usergroup permissions. For each forum, you can override any of the general usergroup permissions with specific permissions for the particular forum.
• Use the forum usergroup permissions to select who can submit to a particular forum, and the select box on the submission pages will gray out forums which the user does not have permission to submit to.
• Bulk addition of subforums. Add many subforums at once by using subname1[,]subname2[,]subname3 etc as the forum name.
• Alias forums. Make a subforum of one forum become also a subforum of a different forum.
• Moderators. Appoint moderators/editors to oversee specific forums. Choose if you wish to auto-approve submissions by moderators to their own forums. Moderator inherit all subforums of their forum.
• Moderator control panel. Let moderators handle the validation of topics, topic edits and posts within their own forums. Moderators can also keep notes on members or search IPs. Moderator actions are logged for you to review.
• Make a forum act as a link to a url.

Membership-Specific Features

• Visitors can register or login via facebook with WSN's facebook connect integration. This easy one-click process increases your signups.
• A convenient member home area where registered users can manage their submitted topics and posts, preferences, subscriptions, etc.
• Registration options. Use direct registration, require e-mail validation, require manual validation of members by the admin, require both email and manual validation, or make registration invitation-only.
• Advanced usergroup permissions. Create custom usergroups, and specify the exact permissions of guests, registered members and administrators. Assign secondary usergroups or special access to a forum as well.
• Allow usergroups to edit topics they've submitted. Require validation of edits if you wish, based on usergroup.
• Member list and profiles. View all members and various details, make this publicly available if you wish.
• Members may choose avatars and signatures. These appear by posts the member posts, although you could use them with topics if you desired. Avatars can be automatically resized to the desired dimensions, no need to reject based on size.
• Member time zone. Members may select to view all dates and times from their own time zone.
• Member ratings. Use a custom formula (or the standard one provided) to determine the value of members, and show their rank ordered by this formula.
• Member rank titles and images, which can be determined by number of topics, number of posts, or rating.
• Option for members to subscribe to notifications of matches for a list of keywords.
• An option for members to be notified of moderator actions on their submissions.
• The total time online of each member can be tracked and displayed.
• Custom permissions restrictions. Via html comment at the top of any template, quickly restrict the viewing of that page to particular usergroups. Or, just edit a forum to quickly restrict it from being viewed by particular usergroups.
• Personal lists for members. Members can make a list of their favorite topics, either directly transferring existing topic from your site into their list or by submitting them manually if you choose to allow it.
• Personal guestbooks, where members can say hi to each other.
• Auction-style feedback system, suitable for marketplace or services directories.
• Registration invitations system, allowing google-style beta marketing.

Search Features

• Autocomplete. Search suggestions pop up while people type.
• Simple search boxes. Do a simple search for topics, and choose in the admin panel which fields are searched for this.
• Remote search boxes. Allow people to place a search box on their own site which let their visitors search your site.
• Search in forum. Let people refine their searches to all content beneath a particular forum.
• Advanced search. Find items where any particular field is equal to, contains the term, has any of the words, has all of the words, is less than, or is greater than the search term... or search for where items are between two numbers.
• Boolean searches. Use 'and' and 'or' operators and group with parentheses in advanced search, or configure the simple search box to be boolean if desired.
• Configure the strictness of the search. If you don't have many articles yet you may set it to be lax and show any results where any of the search words are found even in the middle of a longer word, or if you have more content require the full word to match and require all of the searched-for words to match if desired.
• Highlight search words. On the search result pages, the words which were being searched for are highlighted (this uses the .searchhighlight CSS class so that changing the look of the highlight is simple).
• Sort search results. Order the results by any field.
• Search within results. Refine the results to only those containing a particular term.
• Log searches. Track the searching habits of your visitors by logging their searches to a file.
• Show most searched terms. Display whatever number of most popular search terms you wish in whatever format you wish.
• Search result columns. Put search results in any number of columns per row (default is 1).

Administrative Features

• WSN Forum's validation interface is full of helpful tools. Request revisions of topics or posts with a click. Got spam from members? Check the boxes, then select "delete and ban" to remove the submissions and member accounts at once.
• IP banning. Rid yourself of troublemakers by banning IP ranges. IPs are tracked for each submission, member registration and vote. Ban from site, or just from re-registering if you prefer. Select to block all unresolvable host names and proxies from registration if you wish.
• Search users and topics by IP city with geolocation -- quickly find everyone in a given city to spot suspect activity. You can also block by city.
• An option to block spammers based on stopforumspam.com's blacklist.
• Numerous control and collaboration features such as a warning points system, moderator whiteboard, reports resolution area, the ability to suggest bans, and the option to flag posts containing terms.
• Validation. Specify for each usergroup if the admin will have to validate their topics, forums, posts, or topic edits. When a topic edit needs to be validated, the original topic remains visible as it was until the changes are approved. Send custom messages to submitter on acceptance or rejection.
• Backup and restore. Use the admin panel to download a quick backup of your WSN Forum database content, and then easily restore backups through the admin panel. Have backups automatically generated for you every x days if you like.
• Censor or replace words or phrases. Prevent users from swearing, and/or place links around particular text, etc.
• Mass-replace. Globally replace one bit of text with another across all language items or all templates. Also globally replace according to advanced criteria for topics, forums, posts and members.
• Control behavior of redirects. Decide for yourself exactly which page you want the user sent to after they take a particular action.
• Required fields. Select exactly which fields you wish to require the user to fill in. If it's not filled in, the user doesn't lose any data but has the chance to complete the missing field(s).
• Reset fields. If you wish, select particular topic fields to automatically reset to be blank every x days.
• WSN Codes. Replace HTML's functionality with custom WSN Codes. Create as many as you like.
• Smilies. Add as many smilies as you like.
• Option to restore default settings, in case you do something which turns out to be a particularly major mistake.
• Restrict administrative account logins to a particular IP range for an extra level of security.
• View stats on registration and submission rates.

Advanced Developer Features

• Use PHP in templates, in addition to the conditionals syntax. If you know php, make use of it in any way you like. This makes it easy to do major changes without having to edit the source files.
• Pluggable functions. If you know PHP you can easily incorporate new behavior without complicating your upgrades.
• Pseudomethods. Create new template variables by writing a function, without complicating upgrades.
• Drop in new tables... they'll just work.
• Run scripts at set intervals as simulated cron jobs.
• Place files in a /modifications/ site to have their content auto-inserted into every page. Use the modification generator for more complex changes.

More Features

• A rich-text (WYSIWYG) editor.
• Supports LaTeX and MathML markup for math and science sites.
• Online users list. Optionally display a list of who's currently browsing your site, including their IP and browser. Show who's in a particular forum or posts thread, and show the most ever online stats.
• Calendar system. Schedule events, edit them, join events, or subscribe to the calendar.
• Shoutbox for quick public messages between users.
• Quotes display system, to enterain people with witty quotations or build a collection of quotes of your own users.
• A scalable HTML5/AJAX chat room for community meetings, seminars or peer-to-peer support.
• Submitters can add an RSS feed whose items will be inserted into the site daily.
• Tagging, with a tag cloud.
• Payment detail logging.
• Filters for links and posts.
• A private messaging system to allow members to contact each other.
• An integrated instant messaging system to allow members to chat with each other while browsing the site.
• Contact form, to allow visitors to quickly email you (without your email being revealed).
• An extensible help system to allow you to write instructions for your visitors.