Forum Improvements
Drupal's core forum module on its own does not have all the features of stand alone software such as vBulletin and phpBB. Because of this, many people discount Drupal's ability to provide a forum for their site and look to bridges to use stand alone software with Drupal. But Drupal is capable of doing most of what such programs provide when you make use of the many forum related contributed modules.
The goals of this group are as follows:
- Strengthen the core forum to provide a solid foundation. This includes improving the code, speeding up the queries, and possibly radical changes such as moving away from comments for replies.
- Continue work on the contributed modules that make up a full forum.
- Create new contributed modules that fill in any gaps in functionality.
- Provide documentation to help people put together a complete forum package.
- Create an install profile or distribution that puts together everything needed to build a forum in an easy to set up and install package.
Anyone with an interest in Drupal as a forum 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.
Note: This group was formed from the existing "drubb" group on Oct 23, 2008.
Drupal 7 core forum module - plan of attack
Drupal's core forum module is much maligned. Some of this is unjustified - people expecting it to replace standalone solutions by itself and ignoring the nature of Drupal's modular framework. However, it also has some limitations which are a result of its age and require many workarounds for large community sites.
Many of the forum module's limitations are down to its dependency on the taxonomy module (making it hard to integrate with organic groups etc.) and on comment.module, which is itself in need of a rewrite.
So we're proposing a ground up rewrite of forum.module using nodes.
Query Count
Just a quick rudimentary count of a post with 4 replies. In Druapl, using user stats with joined date, post count, and online indicator, the devel module lists 86 queries. As a comparison I installed a MyBB board and created the same thread. MyBB listed 18 queries. VB lists roughly the same queries. In this thread VB reports 15 queries.
What are the performance ramifications with the query count?
Does AF do anything to lower the query count?
Flat Commments and Threading
An idea I had after reading this post from Michelle. http://groups.drupal.org/node/20542#comment-71555
I have a possible solution for Point 1 from Michelle.
Instead of turning off threading with flat comments, what if a reply to a specific comment, automatically creates a new thread with the comment being replied to as the top post and the reply being the second post. A link to this new thread could be inserted underneath the comment in the original thread.
Node post in node type as well as in Forum for discussion
I want that whenever user post for Jobs it will also add in forum for discussion.
Any help is appreciated.
Core forum user interface issue
Categories field is collapsed by default when creating new forum topics.
In Drupal core forum (when there is more than one vocabulary assigned to the forum content type) creating a new forum topic causes the categories field to appear collapsed by default.
See attached pics.
This is not very user friendly - especially since category is a required element. Typically the user will miss the field altogether and submit a forum post only to receive a red box warning - somewhat ironically around the now visible category field.
Master feature list
For the DruBB project, I took some time and wrote up a spreadsheet with all the feature requests plus features found in vBulletin and phpBB. I went through and noted what is covered by core/contrib already and what still needs to be done (FR). It could use some more tidying up but is a good start to seeing what's done and what's needed. You can see the spreadsheet here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=r2eQ3XwGh1X7jZEa9wMNatg&output=html
Michelle
Media in comments
In the Mustard Seed Media podcast http://www.mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode29 Rob said IMCE is the past and that the Media module is the future and that using IMCE for image upload should be abandoned in favor of the upcoming Media module.
While the roadmap and intended featuritis looks great .. I have an important use case which apparently isn't being considered. Namely attaching images and perhaps other media to comments.
It looks like this is only considering adding them to the node, and not to the comments.
What are the issues with threaded comments?
I see discussions about removing threading from comments, and I'd like to make a plea for keeping this feature.
Which way for comments in Drupal 7?
No one likes to play with comment.module, it's long neglected, manages to just about keep up with its basic tasks OK (making it not so broken as to invite a flood of patches), but singularly fails when you want to do anything clever with it due to fairly fundamental architecutural issues (making it a pain to write patches for). But core standards are improving, and it can only limp along for so long.
Group revamping in progress
As of today, I've taken over this group and am in the process of revamping it. I can only work on it in spurts here and there so it's likely to be messy for a while. If anyone has any suggestions for what they'd like to see done with the group, let me know.
Michelle
Request to take over drubb group
I have the perms, but I want to make sure there's a paper trail. I've sent an email to tounano@drupal.org and will give him time to respond. If no answer or if he gives his blessing, I'd like to take over drubb, rename it, and make it into the central hub for forum improvements both with core forum and contrib modules for forums.
Michelle
Is the core forum module still needed anymore?
I know that I will most likely be wrong about this, but with the advancement of CCK, Views, OG and Panels, is the forum module really necessary anymore? My idea being is that with all these "practically core" modules, isn't it feasible to create a forum with just these modules?
I can create a content type called "forum post" manually, set the taxonomy for the forums (granted containers would be an issue) and use views to custom tailor the data shown to the users. I can already create 8/10th's of the forum functionality with just that scenario. Unless I am missing something.
Advanced Forum: Forum Topic List Customizations
Hi folks. I am working with Advanced Forum on Drupal 5.7, a really great module, BTW.
I've easily figured out how to adjust the advf-forum-list.tpl.php page to make "Topics" and "Posts" into clickable links to the topic list page
Now, on the topic list page, I'd like to make both the icon and "replies" link to their respective topic in advf-forum-topic-list.tpl.php
Forum Analysis
Howdy all,
I'm considering writing an analysis on a few forum systems, with the aim of identifying what features "make a difference" when using the environment. Not so much as a feature list, but more a conceptual list. I intend this to be focused towards a document that can be reviewed by all and sundry when it comes to establishing the technologies we use to build core/modules.
Or something like that ;)
Cleaning up the forum module queue
I've just been looking through the issues in the forum module queue, thought for a laugh I'd have a look at the last one: http://drupal.org/node/9729
Is it alright to mark ancient stuff like that fixed? I checked and Drupal 6 adds a unique id to each forum row, so using CSS to attach an icon would be trivial. Just wanted to check that old stuff like that isn't there for a reason. :)
Views in Core and forum.module
From the wiki:
Most of this will be dependent on Views core going into D7 core.
D7 Core forum development wiki
This wiki page is for discussing the plan of attack for D7 core forums.
NB. Please try to keep discussion to concrete tasks and ideas on how this can be accomplished. There are plenty of threads for feature requests elsewhere in the DruBB group, so feel free to read and add to those.
Advanced Forum Module Master To Do List
Note: This list is no longer being updated as the to do list is soley in the issue queue.
Last update: March 13, 2008
KNOWN ISSUES
5/6 Last post doesn't recognize shadow posts (core forum issue)
5/6 Bleed-thru from theme makes unthemed forums look funny
6 _is_forum needs to take into account node types other than forum.
6 Mark all read needs to work on node types other than forum.
6 Mark all read needs menu code implemented
6 Make caching work on last post fetching
DOCUMENTING
Icon for new comments in forum
Currently it is to my knowledge not possible to show with icons if a subforum contains new comments - it's only possible to show new topics.
This is pretty standard functionality and a feature a lot of users have asked about on my sites.
It's just nice to have a quick overview of activity in all forums on the foum listings page.
I asked around for a long itme in forums and on irc, but nobody had some ready-to-go code snippets, so I eventually set upon doing it myself.
