Glossary

This is a comprehensive list of the terms used when discussing the functionalities of django-machina.

Attachment

An attachment is a file associated with a forum message that other forum users may see in order to download it.

Forum

A forum is a container for messages. It is caracterized by a name and can be part of a tree of other forums. That way a forum may have a parent forum and multiples sub-forums. A forum is typed and can correspond to a default forum, a category or a forum link. A default forum contains mesages and can have sub-forums. A category can only contains default forums. A forum link redirects to a specified link and cannot have sub-forums.

Forum permission

Forum permissions define what actions a user (anonymous or not) can do or not in a specific forum (eg. answer to forum topics).

Post

A post is a message embedded into a conversation that was submitted by a forum user. A post usually consists of a title and a text, but can also contain attachments.

Topic

A forum topic represents a conversation between forum users. It contains messages (or “posts”) that were submitted by the forum users. A topic generally refers to the name of the conversation and the first message (or “post”) embedded into it. A forum topic may contain additional contents like polls. A forum topics can be typed and can correspond to a normal topic, a sticky topic or an announcement. A normal topic is a regular conversation that will slide down the forum if no other posts are created into it and get bumped to the top of the forum otherwise. A sticky topic is a topic that is stuck at the top of the first page of a forum. An announcement is a topic that is stuck at the top of every page of a forum.