SharePoint Forums 1.1 Released

Happy times are here again. I’ve finished the packaging and released version 1.1 of the SharePoint Forums Web Part. This contains a fairly large chunk of bug fixes and new functionality. Here’s a rundown:

• Installation. Installation is HUGELY simplified. Just download the MSI and run it. Yeah, should have done that a long time ago.
• Language Support. This release includes a language file (currently only english is available) with translatable strings from the Web Part. The file is just an xml file and you can create your own (using the existing one as a template) and deploy your own language resources (just drop the file onto the server and go). More instructions on creating additional languages will be available on the Wiki shortly and more translatations are to come with upcoming releases (I didn’t get to externalize them all, but it’s a start).
• Date Sorting. Forums and topics were being displayed backwards (oldest to newest) so this has been corrected to “bump” the latest posts to the top
• Todays Topics. You can now click on a link to show all the topics posted today.
• RSS feeds. Each forum has it’s own unique RSS feed you can subscribe to.
• Cleanup of display. A few links (like Delete Topic) have been cleaned up and put in a better place to make it easier to find. Other minor fixes to the display.
• Performance. This was a big boo-boo I made. Now the forums load in under a second (no matter how many posts you have).
• New Admin Functions. There’s a couple of new admin functions like recalcuating the totals (sometimes they get out of whack), deleting all the forums and restarting, and creating a set of sample data to play around with.

Hope you like it! Keep your suggestions coming in the Discussion Forums and Issue Tracker. Next drop is in August (we’re now on monthly drop cycles) with anonymous users, NNTP synchronization, ASP.NET 2.0 and MOSS 2007 support!

You can grab the file from the Releases section on CodePlex or directly from here.

Enjoy!