One of the nicest things about online portals is the amount of user interactivity they offer via their discussion boards and online chat rooms. A prime example of this is Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.com/), which has hundreds of comments on every new topic or article posted on the site; reading them is always an entertaining experience, and they add a wonderful sense of community to the site.
Why am I bringing this up? Because I've been playing with Zope a lot lately, and one of my recent projects involved building a Zope-based portal which included a discussion forum.
At first, I thought that I would have to design and build this forum myself from scratch - until a search on Google and Zope.org turned up a very neat little Zope Product named ZUBB, which offered all the features I needed. Installation was a snap, the package was stable, full-featured, and easy to customize, and - best of all - it worked like a charm, allowing me to add Slashdot-type discussion boards easily and transparently to my Zope-based site.
If this is something you've always wanted to do, but never known where to begin, this is your lucky day - over the next few pages, I'm going to guide you through the process of installing, using and customizing ZUBB on your Zope portal. Keep reading!
