DruBB

Drupal 7 core forum module - plan of attack

catch — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:22:49 +0000

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.

Nodes? Surely that would require the pipe dream of comments as nodes? We hear you say.

Well, no it wouldn't. In the new forum module, posts are nodes, and some posts are also forum topics. Forum topics become simply the first post in a thread, and are nothing special by themselves.

We think even forums themselves might become nodes, with the hierarchical structure handled by the menu system - allowing for multiple separate forums, forums within organic groups and the rest.

But if all posts are nodes, won't that be a performance hit?

Well, maybe not. By decoupling forums from the comment system, we no longer have to support comment threading and the rest. Also, most forums have around 10-30 replies per page rather than the 50-100 comments on many blogging sites. The D7 forum module will also depend on views - which will allow us to get all posts in a couple of queries and bypass node_load.

This will make common features in standalone forum solutions readily available: the ability to browse all recent posts by a user (rather than posts they've commented on, not very useful when the thread is 4,000 posts long), splitting and joining topics, rss feeds, subscriptions, uploads, theming - everything can take advantage of the node system without requiring that Joe's single person blog site get the overhead of comments as nodes.

One of the main issues with moving away completely from comments will be the upgrade path, for example some Drupal forums use threading (notably Drupal.org). However, threading on drupal.org has many issues, not least being unable to use #new links when threads get long enough to use a pager.

In terms of an upgrade path for threaded forum discussions, one possible solution would be to mirror the visual structure of threads as they are now, incrementing a reply ID sequentially based on their position, for example:

Current forum thread:
1
  2
    4
      6
    8
3
  5
7

After upgrade:
1
2
4
6
8
3
5
7

We will be attacking the implementation from a few different directions:

Michelle's advforum module is currently providing the glue code and theming that has been much demanded to lower the barrier to a full featured forum solution in Drupal. We'll be working hard on this for D6 as a precursor to more fundamental changes in D7.
data structure. At the moment, it's likely that forums will be nodes, posts will be nodes, and that some posts will also be forum topics. Identifying a topic may be as simply as forum.nid = forum.topic_id - this "everything is a post" model mirrors other forum solutions and gets us away from the comment paradigm.

We know others are interested in working on this, so it'd be great to co-ordinate efforts. Please subscribe to this group and/or get hold of one of us on IRC

For feature lists (some of which will be, or already are handled in contrib) see the advanced forum module wiki.

There's also plenty more background reading in the DruBB group.

For discussion on how to actually get this done, please see the planning wiki

catch, merlinofchaos, Michelle.

Improvements to core

Benefits of Drupal Forum over third party for newspaper site!

amax — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:09:42 +0000

Dear All,

Our local newspaper site is made with Server Side Includes, and is pretty functional. All past issues etc are pulled in via this way, but we are thinking of introducing a forum to spice things up. I have been researching the various options at http://www.forum-software.org/forumlist but dont see drupal on there which Im quite surprised at (even though drupal is a full content management system, its forum is pretty good for straight out of the box solution). I have used drupal in the past for other newspaper site projects, and found the default forum set up great, but not sure I should go down this road and integrate a drupal site specifically for a forum into our current site over one of these other open source alternatives.
Can anyone plase advise on this. Switching the whole site to drupal is def not an option for this paper (although its what I want:()
What are the benefits of drupal solely as a forum over these other products for a newspaper site

Newspapers on Drupal

Request to take over drubb group

Michelle — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:47:38 +0000

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

Maintenance

Is the core forum module still needed anymore?

specmav — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:13:41 +0000

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.

Wouldn't it make sense to take the functionality that is needed to create forums and spread it out so that it can be used across multiple content types instead of saying that only forum.module can use X module and so forth.

Also in regards to Forum ACL mechanisms like Forum Access, wouldn't it be more flexible to "open" it to other content types so that users could be selected to moderate a specific taxonomy term, instead of limiting it to only forums.

The only issue that I can think of at the moment (I am not a drupal developer) is the theming aspect of making drupal forums look like vB or phpBB (flat forum or adv forum). But instead of creating a forum-only glue module, maybe a more generic and flexible module can be created that can be used across any content type.

The greatest aspect I see in drupal is that I can use a group of modules to customize one content type and then latter do it in a completely different way with another content type. "Locking" modules to forum.module seems kinda anti-Drupal (in the sense that it is not flexible and open).

It just seems to me that if most of the functionality can be created with major, well supported modules and the functionality that can't be done can be moved to a more relevant core module (i.e containers concept moved to taxonomy.module), create a basic smaller module to handle the functionality that cannot be created or see if can be added to CCK/Views/Panels/etc...

Views Developers

Base 36 (Vancode) - leading digit/character

superjacent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:13:04 +0000

I hope this is the right area for this question which refers to the 'thread' field of the table 'comments'. I provide a non php solution to convert Wordpress data to Drupal. I recently became aware that the thread field is not a string of decimal numbers but is in fact a string of base 36 (Vancode) numbers. I've created the necessary functions to convert to and from base 36 format but I'm a little confused re - the leading digit/character.

Here is an excerpt from http://api.drupal.org/api/function/int2vancode/5

Generate vancode.

Consists of a leading character indicating length, followed by N digits with a numerical value in base 36. Vancodes can be sorted as strings without messing up numerical order.

It goes: 00, 01, 02, ..., 0y, 0z, 110, 111, ... , 1zy, 1zz, 2100, 2101, ..., 2zzy, 2zzz, 31000, 31001, ...

So, decimal 35 = z and so it is written as 0z. The leading zero in this case, how does that indicate length? Therefore decimal 36 = 10 and so is written as 110 as per the excerpt above. Again, how does the leading character 1 indicate length when the length of 10 is 2.

Obviously I can see a pattern forming whereby the leading character for the first 36 is 0, the next 36 is 1, the next 2 and so on up until z. Is there an assumption that the leading character will never be greater than "z".

Any help appreciated.

Steve
http://prime357.org

Update: Since no response from the initial group (Database Schema API) I'm posting to other groups I think might be relevant. Secondary question is, for specific backend database type questions which group or forum is most relevant. I've got other backend database type questions waiting in the wings.

Postgresql

Advanced Forum: Forum Topic List Customizations

samrose — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:59:00 +0000

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

Currently, I've tried the following in advf-forum-topic-list.tpl.php (code without beginning comments):

<?php print $pager; ?>
<table id="forum-topic-<?php print $topic_id; ?>">
<thead><tr><?php print $header; ?></tr>

  </thead>
  <tbody>
  <?php foreach ($topics as $topic): ?>
    <?php
    if ($topic->sticky) {
      $stickyclass = 'stickytopic';
      $wassticky = TRUE;
      $topic->title = '<em>' . t('Sticky') . ':</em> ' . $topic->title;
    } else {
      if ($wassticky) {
        $stickyclass = 'firstnotsticky notsticky';
        $wassticky = FALSE;
      } else {
        $stickyclass = 'notsticky';
      }
    }
    ?>

    <tr class="<?php print $topic->zebra;?> <?php print $stickyclass;?>">
<td class="icon"><a href="<?php $topic->title; ?>"><?php print $topic->icon; ?> </a> </td>
      <td class="title">
      <?php
      print $topic->title;
      if (!empty($topic->pager)) {
        print '<div class="forum-topic-pager">' .$topic->pager . '</div>';
      }
      ?></td>
    <?php if ($topic->moved): ?>
      <td colspan="3">
      <?php print $topic->message; ?>
      </td>
    <?php else: ?>
      <td class="replies">
        <a href="<?php $topic->title; ?>"><?php print $topic->num_comments; ?></a>
        <?php if ($topic->new_replies): ?>
          (<a href="<?php print $topic->new_url; ?>"><?php print $topic->new_text; ?></a>)
        <?php endif; ?>
      </td>
      <td class="created"><?php print $topic->created; ?>
      <td class="last-reply"><?php print $topic->last_reply; ?>
    <?php endif; ?>
    </tr>
  <?php endforeach; ?>
  </tbody>
</table>
<?php print $pager; ?>

Basically the parts I modified were:

<td class="icon"><a href="<?php $topic->title; ?>"><?php print $topic->icon; ?> </a> </td>

and

<a href="<?php $topic->title; ?>"><?php print $topic->num_comments; ?></a>

Hoping to turn those items into clickable links.

I'd also like to add a link in advf-forum-topic-list.tpl.php under "Last Reply" to take a user to the last reply/comment for that topic.

Finally, on advf-forum-topic-list.tpl.php I would like to be able to include the data for "$forum->description" from advf-forum-list.tpl.php to advf-forum-topic-list.tpl.php

Looking for some advice on how to accomplish these in Drupal 5 (and Drupal 6 eventually), and pledge to rework into a wiki page here that can be included in documentation. Thanks!!!!!

General	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Version	v 2.2.2	5.1.22	2.0.21	1.1.3	3.6.7
UTF-8 Support	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Type	Threaded or Flat	Threaded or Flat	Flat	Flat	Threaded or Flat	Threaded/Flat
Installation method	wizard	wizard		wizard	wizard	Module install
Upgrade method	wizard	wizard	3rd party wizard	wizard	wizard	n/a
Data Storage	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
MySQL	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Postgres		Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Oracle	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
SQLite		No	No	No	No	No
LaTeX		No	No	No	No	No
other	MS SQL		MS SQL 7/2000, MS Access
Posts	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
BBCode	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HTML	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	BBCode module
Emoticons	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Smileys
Formatting Toolbar	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Various
WYSIWYG Editor	Yes	Plugin		No	Yes	Various
Quoting	Nested	Nested	Nested	Nested	Single	Quote
Syntax Highlighting	Yes	Plugin		Yes	Yes	Codefilter
Attachments	Multiple files	Multiple files	No	Multiple files	Multiple files	Various
Forums	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Categories	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Taxonomy
Subforums	unlimited	multiple levels	No	unlimited	unlimited	Yes
Last Post	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Advforum
Redirect Forums	Yes	No	No	Plugin	Yes	No
Trashcan Forum	Optional	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Anti-Spam and Security	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
CAPTCHA	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Various
Groups	Multiple groups	Multiple groups	Multiple groups	Multiple groups	Multiple groups	OG
Flood Control	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
ACLs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial
Blacklist	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Warnings	Yes	Plugin	No	Plugin	Yes	No
Suspension	Yes	Plugin	No	Yes	Yes	User block
Bans	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
IP-Block	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Audit Logging		Plugin		Yes		??
User Reports		Yes		Yes	Yes	No
Other				An Akismet mod is available
Notification	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
RSS/ATOM	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes/??
E-Mail	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Instant Messaging	0	0	plugin			Contrib
Bookmarks	Yes	Yes	No	Plugin	Yes	Views bookmarks
Community	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Avatars	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
User Ranks	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	User points / badges / titles
Rating/Karma System	Yes	Plugin		Yes	Yes	Fivestar/karma
Signatures	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Signature_forums
Users Online List	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes, but more coming in advforum
Private Messaging	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Privatemsg
Custom profile fields	Yes	Yes	No	Plugin	Yes	Yes
Moderation	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Moderators	global and forums	global and forums	global and forums	global, forums and threads	global and forums	Forum access
Move Threads	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Split Threads	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Comment mover
Close Threads	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Shadow Topics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sticky Threads	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Important Threads	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Coming to advforum
Search	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Full-text search	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Author search	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Advanced search	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Unread Topics		No		Database tracked	Database tracked	Yes
Customization	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Languages	Integrated language editor	Many user contributed.	50+	25+	Official: English, German, Chinese, Hungarian; Translatable into any language	Any on g.d.o
Templates	global and forum specific	global and forum specific	global	global and forum specific	global and forum specific	Drupal themes
Custom BBCodes	Yes	No	No	Plugin	Yes	Yes?
Skin-Editor	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	??
Smiley Packs	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Plugins	Optional	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes
Special Features	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Statistics	Yes	Plugin		Yes	Yes	Yes
Polls	Yes	Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Calendar	Yes	No	Patch	Yes	Yes	Yes)
Friendly URLs	Yes	Plugin	No	Yes	Yes	Yes)
Data Management	Invision Power Board	Phorum	phpBB	SMF	vBulletin	Drupal
Pruning	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Archiving	Yes	No	No		No	??
Export Formats	Word, HTML			WAP(2), IMode	Single Table CSV, Single and Multi-Table SQL	??
Export private messages	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	??
Lo-Fi View	Yes	Optional	No	Yes	Yes	??

DruBB

Drupal 7 core forum module - plan of attack

Benefits of Drupal Forum over third party for newspaper site!

Request to take over drubb group

Is the core forum module still needed anymore?

Base 36 (Vancode) - leading digit/character

Advanced Forum: Forum Topic List Customizations

Wiki page question

Forum Analysis

Cleaning up the forum module queue

Views in Core and forum.module

D7 Core forum development wiki

Advanced Forum Module Master To Do List

Icon for new comments in forum

Show parent forum in tracker

Any experience with multiple forums?

Advanced forum module wiki

To do (incomplete list)

Helper modules

Link to

Pull from

Related modules

Forum administration

Editor related

User related

Misc

Code snippets

Items to backport from D6

Uncoded feature requests

Links to existing posts about improving the forums

Unorganized section

Forum enhancement module

Spanish Installation Profile of a Drupal BB

The future of flatforum

Comparison of current forum software

New module to assign titles to users

With all the work going into fixing the core forum module, you might not be interested, but...

One-to-one tables, required revisions, preview as revision?

Help review the 'Custom content types as forum topics' patch

DruBB - Proposals, Features and Funding!

Getting our act together

Forum deprecated? ;)

Whispering - Better than Private Messages?

Comments as Nodes lab results [UPDATED: 08-Apr 22:00 GMT +2]

Simple comments execution time calculation

Comments as nodes execution time calculation

Conclusion

UIE Forum for drupal 5

DruBB architecture discussion.