README

Overview.
=========

For more info: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/fofou/

Fofou (Forums For You) is a simple forum software inspired by
Joel On Software forum software (http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel).

It's mostly a port of FruitShow PHP forum
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/fruitshow) to Google App Engine 
(http://code.google.com/appengine/).

Where can I see it in action?
=============================

Forums for my Sumatra PDF viewer are powered by Fofou:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/forum_sumatra/

Installation.
=============

Fofou runs on Google App Engine infrastructure. You need to get App Engine
account and upload fofou (see
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/gettingstarted/uploading.html for
details).

Once installed, you can create one or more forums through web interface.

Deployment philosophy.
======================

Fofou isn't designed as a forum hosting platform for hosting hundreds of forums
for many people.

It's designed to host a few forums for one person so the owner of App Engine
account is implicitly an admin for all forums hosted from that account.

Design philosophy.
==================

You'll quickly see that Fofou differs in many ways from most common forum
software. There are good reasons for the differences and Joel Spolsky describes
those reason in great detail:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html

License.
========

The python code is written completely by me and is in Public Domain.

Html/css/js files are mostly lifted from FuitShow, so they fall under
FruitShow's BSD license.

Contributing.
=============

Fofou is open-source so if you want to improve the code, contribute more skins
etc., fork http://github.com/kjk/fofou/tree/master, make your changes and let me
know. If the changes are good, I'll pull them into my repo.