Kick-start: List of modules required for phpBB/vBulletin clone

Culling information from multiple forum posts and "stuff in my head," here's a list of modules that we'll need and some other "kick-start" info. Feel free to suggest others in the comments and we can get 'em added in here.

Core

• Forum (I know, shocker!!)
• Comment
• Poll (possibly? or advanced poll -- see below)
• Profile
• Taxonomy

Contrib

• ACL: General access control library.
• Advanced Poll: Poll module with more options (thanks to Michelle for this!)
• BBCode: Add BBCode formatting option.
• Comment Mover: Allows moving comments from one thread to another. NEEDS PORTING TO 5.0
• flatform: Handle displaying forums to be more like phpBB-style output.
• Forum Access: Moderation access for forum module.
• Forum Admin Links: Adds "close this thread" and so on links to forum nodes (thx to Moshe for the tip).
• privatemsg: Allow users to send private messages back and forth. NEEDS PORTING TO 5.0
• Smileys: Add in smiley conversion. UPDATE TO 5.0 IN PROGRESS

New contrib pieces

• "Welcome" module: Part of the PHPBB install process asks for some basic stuff like user 1 name/pass, e-mail address, and site name. Makes sense to include this in the installer for DruBB as well, but it makes even more sense to separate this out so it can be re-used by other distros.
• Pseudo-WYSIWYG editor: There are two modules to handle the "little bar above that you click and it inserts the stuff for you" requirement: quicktags and BBCode Formatting Bar. I like that QuickTags is written more general, for support with multiple input formats; however it still needs work on its user interface and the amount of options available, and also needs to be ported to 5.0 and jQuery.
• Signature module: I could swear there was already a signature module but I scoured contrib and can't find it. But we need something to handle:
  • Displaying signatures on both nodes and comments.
  • Removing the core behaviour of dumping the signature into the comment field.
  • Display signatures on output so that they're dynamic and change across all posts when the user changes their signature.

  There's some code we might be able to use as a starting base in the Fix signatures issue.

• Subscriptions module, according to Heine, needs not only a port to 5.0 but also a re-write. This module would handle subscriptions to posts, comments, etc.
• Something to handle comment moderation, according to Heine, a good solution for this doesn't currently exist.

New core pieces

Things that could be really useful additions to Drupal core include:

• The ability to have private forums. This will probably translate to acl module and forum access in core, though it could also be acl.module and taxonomy_access in core.
• The ability to assign "moderators" for certain nodes. This could be done for both blogs (blog authors should be able to delete comments on their blogs and forums, so might be useful as a core addition.
• Robust subscription options: The ability to subscribe to all nodes in a term, nodes by a certain author, comments on a specific node, etc.
• Make user profiles CCK nodes: This would allow searchability, additional field types, and on and on. This probably also means things like placing "add to registration form" and "visibility limted to X" on any CCK field.
• Making poll an add-on option to existing node types: This would allow people to add a poll to their blog, or to their forum post, or to a random page in Drupal, etc.

Drupal.org forum posts/book pages where this stuff is discussed

• Ask your questions here re: Drupal and phpBB
• Drupal modules equivalent to phpBB2 features
• Drupal forums wish list/site recipe

Other groups that may have some info/interest in this

• http://groups.drupal.org/profiles-as-nodes
• http://groups.drupal.org/social-networking-sites

Other crazy features

There are other things that people might want, such as user points and rankings, karma, etc. but I think we should go for "core" functionality first.