Working on forums today – not the implementation but the style and layout.

Couple of people (Marc Fleury and Neil Cherry) already pointed out that they couldn't tell the difference between what is a forum page and what is a wiki page. There's a reason for that – they are actually one and the same.

It makes sense if you think about it – you have wiki pages with comments on them and forum posts with replies to them. As a software engineer it is pretty trivial to recognize the common model there. So a forum post becomes a very short wiki page (usually with a lot of comment activity). Or perhaps a wiki page is an elaborate forum posting?

Doesn't make a difference really. What we have are root (or parent) documents and child documents.

This is actually a design I spent thinking about a couple of years back when I last time checked community collaboration software. Why do we need a separate wiki and forum softwares? Or even a separate blog or issue tracker software for that matter? They all work on the same document model.

Anyway, the Confluence forum plugin we are using is still very new – a bit raw. And the initial raw look gives a very little feeling of a traditional forum functionality. Hence the attempt to enforce that with some styling, to give people the look and feel they expect. We will see how that works out in the end.

I have to admit though that the forum part of the software we chose was my biggest concern when we started. It won't be a match for established forum software that is already out there. I like however the fact that I get search index and single sign-on integration for "free" with this solution so I hope in the end, as the software matures, the forums will also be "good enough".

Going through a process of discovery here.