Forum development

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.

This is a working group for developing Drupal discussion/forum modules. "Forum" is interpreted loosely to allow for modern interpretations as well as traditional forums but is aimed at providing a space for longer lasting discussions rather "instant messaging" or status updates. Currently covered modules are Forum (in core), Advanced Forum (contributed module that builds on core Forum), and Artesian (new forum module) but other modules are welcome as well.

Anyone with an interest in creating forums in Drupal is welcome to join in the discussion. This is not, however, a support group so please use the issue queues and Drupal.org's forums for support requests. Also, please do not post jobs in this group unless you wish to hire someone to work on forum development that will be contributed back to the community.

Michelle's picture

Repurposing and reviving the forum group

This group was originally "drubb" and aimed at discussing making a forum install profile. When that effort fizzled out, I repurposed this group to be "Forum improvements" aimed at making Drupal's forum offering better. While it was never explicitly core (AF is contrib but builds on core), it had a definite "core leaning". Because of that, I started a new group for Artesian.

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miromarchi's picture

Tools to improve online discussions towards collective intelligence

Dear all, I just want to share some few links about tools which help improving online collective conversations with the aim of fostering collective intelligence.
Develped inside FP7 european framework's Catalyst project, there are some cool tools.

ASSEMBL, LITEMAP, DEBATEHUB, EDGESENSE

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heylookalive's picture

Harmony distribution

Happy new year all!

Some quick news, there's now a minimal Harmony distribution that you can try out. It's another building block onto the others and is an excellent start for what will be the full featured Harmony "product".

You can find the distribution here:
https://www.drupal.org/project/harmony

You can give it a try here:
http://simplytest.me/project/harmony

As of now it's basically a few harmony modules along with pre-configured contrib ones such as Honeypot the first unique feature is a nice looking installer theme, more to come :)

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heylookalive's picture

Harmony - DrupalCamp London talk

For anyone coming to DrupalCamp London at the end of the month there will be a session on Harmony!

It'll be on Saturday at 2PM, there'll also be some free stickers going :)

Here's a link for anyone who's interested:
http://2014.drupalcamplondon.co.uk/drupalcamp-london-2014/session/harmon...

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heylookalive's picture

Harmony - What's the most important feature for you? (harmony_* modules to make after core)

Access control - hidden and moderator only forums
14% (7 votes)
Anti-SPAM
0% (0 votes)
Comments - use harmony forum as a commenting method
4% (2 votes)
Mailhandler - allow posting of replies via email
4% (2 votes)
Messaging - Private messaging
6% (3 votes)
Notifications - On mention or reply to a post get a notification!
18% (9 votes)
Migrate - Handlers for core forum, advanced forum, vbulletin, phpbb
20% (10 votes)
Moderation - Extra tools for moderation of threads & posts
6% (3 votes)
OG - Integration with Organic Groups
12% (6 votes)
Poll - Integration with Poll or another poll module
4% (2 votes)
Popularity - Graphing, extra views etc with Radioactivity
6% (3 votes)
Search - Specific search integration
2% (1 vote)
Social sign on - Allow sign in with Facebook, Twitter etc
2% (1 vote)
User points - Integration
0% (0 votes)
Total votes: 49
heylookalive's picture

A Drupal forum, what do you want? A call for opinions!

I'm currently working on Harmony Forum which is a native Drupal forum built with two entities (Thread and Post) with Taxonomy for categories should you want them.

That's the shortest possible description which outlines an entity based forum, a bit more in depth would be leveraging contrib as much as possible to produce something like Discourse (http://try.discourse.org). All whilst coding so that Views are used and can be overridden, display elements can be changed with Field UI and that there are plenty of hooks and chances to jump in and do what you need to.

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heylookalive's picture

Harmony forum

Hi,

I've just posted my roadmap of sorts for Harmony (a forum distro I'm working on) and figured I'd post here too :)

Copied from my post on Artisan forums issue queue...

Architecture wise starting out by looking at all the current solutions - both Drupal and outside of Drupal (Discoruse, vBulletin, phpBB, Invision) and have come out with a strong vision. Looking at Mud my method differs in key places.

It will comprise of the following, but not requiring anything other than core:

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ul>

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ponyxprs's picture

Missing discussion

Anyone know where the discussion or whether to use nodes or entities went? It has 20+ comments, and some ideas in it. Not sure what happened?

John

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ponyxprs's picture

What should be stored in a forum post?

So... What should be stored in a forum post? Whether it is a node or entity, what should we store? And how?

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ponyxprs's picture

Use 'Node' or custom entity for forum posts

For this new project, would it be better to use the existing node in core or create a custom entity for forum posts?

  • existing node uses extra tables to add forum functionality and tracking, this adds table look ups and updates

  • a custom entity couild be made to hold all data in one table row per post, but do we lose some traditional Drupal functionality with other modules if we don't use the built in node?

And what should be recorded per post?

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ponyxprs's picture

A new forum project, a call for ideas and coders

A new project.

I think we all know that the built in Drupal forum is lacking, and currently it is a roadblock for many site developers, myself included. So in the community spirit I am inviting anyone and everyone to contribute ideas, theories, time, code, anything. it is way more than anyone can handle alone, but with colaboration it can be done.
Currently I named it "Colloquium", but feel free to suggest names :)

I am going to start a few other topics for the purpose of brainstorming, and will post them here.

John

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Untitled project (a native forum for Drupal)

Having used phpBB2 & 3, SMF, YaBB, xenForo, to build communitis, and even looked at a few others, vBulletin 4 & 5 IPB I came to a conclusion. None have a decent CMS. I think, in my short 3 years, think Drupal is great, but is severly lacking a threaded discussion (forum) solution. Many say to use a bridge, this is not the place for that discussion. This wiki page is going to be a brainstorming page for general questions that anyone may have. iam not sure how it (the wiki page) will work out, so we can just play it by ear.

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PlayfulWolf's picture

Call to action: Go Organic Groups way.

I am with little success, or to express myself more correct - in very time consuming way building couple communities with Drupal 7. The centerpiece of them has to be some kind of a forum.

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drupalpupal's picture

Why re-invent the wheel?

For whatever reason, a self contained D6 forum module was never allowed to be included in the official modules but I've worked with this module quite a bit and I believe it is SERIOUSLY worth looking at, even if for just a basis or starting point or maybe even, if nothing else, a proof of concept. It can be found here: http://www.richardpeacock.com/blog/2010/10/rp-forum-drupal-6-module

It has most (if not all) the features all the "big" forums have such as:

Features (included without additional modules!)

Ability to ban users based on IP and IP ranges
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Michelle's picture

How best to use Views for threads or is it even needed?

I originally intended to use EFQ to list the posts in a single thread because I didn't see any advantage in using Views for this list. But at DrupalCon, I spoke with fubhy and he recommended going with Views. I'm a little fuzzy on the arguments (it was late night after Friday's sprint :) ) but one that stands out is being able to add and re-arrange the various fields on a post.

I decided to go that route but, when I actually went to implement it, I ended up unsure how best to proceed.

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ul>

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Michelle's picture

Artesian: Forum permissions and access

The core Drupal permission system is nice for simple permissions but not up to the detailed level of permissions that a good forum needs. We need not only global permissions but also forum-specific ones. For example:

create threads
create threads in foo
create threads in bar
create foothreads [a subtype of thread]
create foothreads in foo
create foothreads in bar

etc...

In addition, we need to be able to hook into OG's permission system for group forums.

Trying to handle all that in hook_permission() is insanity.

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Artesian: Roadmap

Update Jan 6: I simplified the roadmap for now. While working on phase 1, I realized that I'm not ready to make even a tentative roadmap of anything beyond getting the core done, yet. While I know all the stuff that will be added, it's too hard to say even roughly what order they will be added. I thought the style system would be after the core but I think that may get worked on in Phase 1 instead. So, for now, keeping this simple. During / after Phase 2, I will write a more detailed roadmap.

Update Feb 10: Still getting messy. :) I keep working on it and it gets more and more polished in some areas but there's still a lot of rough stuff and I still find myself changing data structures and making other massive changes frequently enough that I'm not ready to leave the comfort of the sandbox, yet. I think (hope?), though, that I'm nearing the end of the tornado changes and getting closer to having something basically usable.

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megan_m's picture

Slides from Drupal Forums: A Case Study presentation

Below are the slides from last night's presentation to the Waterloo Region user's group on Drupal Forums, using The Webmaster Forums as a case study. Audio possibly to come soon if we can clean it up adequately.

For more information, we have two articles on our switch to Drupal Forums here:

Goodbye vBulletin, Part One: Reasons to Switch
Goodbye vBulletin, Part Two: How We Got Away

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Artesian: Feature set

This is an initial stab at a feature list that I wrote a couple of months ago. It's mostly a brain dump and needs to be gone over, improved, and worked into a proper roadmap.

FORUMS

Forums can be categories (containers), normal forums, or link forums with the ability to add new forum types. Forums are entities and fieldable.
Categories and forums can be nested with post information from all subforums aggregated and shown on the front page.
One thread type included but more can be added.

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Artesian: Initial brainstorming

This document is from my first start on Artesian last May, moved over here from the Forum Improvements group. I ended up having to put Artesian on hiatus all summer due to illness and another project with a deadline. I'll be starting back in on it, soon, and will be writing more documents to plan out each bit. I've moved this over here for reference of my initial thoughts.

Entities

Forum entity

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