Meld Solutions Inc.

Meld Forums Community Addin

Nearly completed, the Meld Forums Community Addin will be the first of many plugins to extend the functionality of Meld Forums, version 2.0. The addin will also serve as an example of how to exploit the new extensible and event-driven nature of Meld Forums.

What will the Community addin offer?

Simply put, the plugin allows users to mark a post as the correct answer to a question posed in a thread. When a post is marked correct, by a thread author or an administrator, the plugin deposits community points into the post author’s community account.

Like other Meld products, the community addin is being created with extensibility in mind. One of these features includes the ability for developers to access community accounts through a transaction manager object. This easily accessed object contains simple methods which deposit or withdraw points from community accounts allowing easy development of other plugins which rely on community points.

Other features include:

• Administrators can choose the amount of points awarded for a correctly answered thread.
• Users can be limited to the amount of unanswered threads they’ve authored within a forum.
• User accounts track both a total points accumulated and an account balance.
• Accounts can be suspended or points can be added to accounts directly within the administrator.
• Total points accumulated are displayed under the users avatar and within their profile page.
• Settings panel determines whether thread authors, administrators or both can mark posts as correct.

The Meld Community addin is scheduled for release in parallel with Meld Forums version 2. If you have any questions/features you would like to see within the Community Addin please post your suggestions in the forum.