I recently struggled to get a poll into my forums and gave up. The other day I listened to the lullabot podcast that was deprecating half of Drupal. Then, today, I wanted to write a post and couldn't decide whether to put it in the forum or as a story. I decided to put it in the forum because it's easy to show a forum node elsewhere but impossible to put a story in the forum if I change my mind.
All of this got me thinking, what's so special about forum nodes? Why is forum so rigid? I'm aware that there's work going on to improve the forum module, but I'm wondering why we need it at all? What does it give you beyond what you can do with taxonomy and views? Forums are just taxonomy listings, really, and views can do that.
I should stop and say here that I realize having something in core, which views is not, is important. But this is more of an exploring options type of discussion than a serious suggestion to just dump forums completely.
Let's say I, on my site, decided to drop forum.module in favor of taxonomy and views. What am I losing? Could whatever functionality I'm using be easily replaced with a less restrictive module?
This seems like it would offer more flexibility. If I want a poll to show up in the forums, I simply tag it with the taxonomy term of one of my forums and the view picks it up. No worries about whether it's a forum node or not. All nodes could potentially be forum nodes. This sounds ideal to me.
I'm willing to put effort into exploring this as an alternative to offer but I thought I'd post this general query first. If there are major showstoppers with the views route that people already know about, I don't want to waste my time. I'm not under any illusion of being the first to think of this, so I'm willing to learn from other peoples' mistakes. :)
Thanks,
Michelle
PS: Mea culpa on not searching first... I just had this itch to ask and only a few minutes to spare. If there's a discussion on this already, feel free to yell at me with a link. ;)
Comments
The only functionality you'd
The only functionality you'd lose is probably breadcrumbs; almost everything you'd lose you could accomplish through theming. Well, the other functionality you'd lose would be compatibility with forum helper modules (such as forum_access).
I think the theming would be hard work, but I think once completed, the recipe could be packaged up and reposted and would be very useful.
Theming
I've spent quite a bit of time theming my forums using flatforum... That's something to consider. I don't know if that could be made to work with views. Also, forum access is a good point. I want the ability to have private forums on my site. I'm thinking at this point it's probably not worth doing on the site I'm working on but worth trying in general. Once I get a few other things done that are piling up, I'll give it a good run through on a test site and see what I can come up with.
Thanks for the input.
Michelle
It's probably worth
It's probably worth mentioning that you could always use one of the other access modules. I personally use taxonomy access control for all of my forum and non forum content.
Moderators
True, but forum access has the concept of moderators which I really need for the site I'm working on. I still think the idea has merit in general, but using forum access and possibly flatforum compatibility is a major con.
Michelle
I would try to be very
I would try to be very accomodating with forum access. Would need to figure out HOW but once we have a solid recipe, forum access could be modified to respect it.
Sounds good
BTW, I just realized I have a bad typo in my previous post. That should be LOSING forum access would be bad, not USING it. LOL
Sounds like maybe this idea isn't as crazy as I thought. :) I think flatforum can be made to work with it. That's mostly a matter of theming, so getting the class names from forum in there might trick it. I'd have to play with it to see.
Thanks,
Michelle
Great topic.
Hi all,
I'm new to Drupal (it's great!) and was just reading on how to use the taxonomy modules in the handbook. Even just now my mind keeps switching between a) wow, this is great! and b) can't you just do a search? But ok, let's go with the former for the moment, especially since we also have this Drupal-everything-is-a-node paradigm. So I figured we could use this taxonomy module for a forum, a user could create a forum topic and tag it with the appropriate vocabulary terms. The topics would then be stored in 1 big list, and retrieved like that (newest topic on top), or in any kind of way using views with those same vocabulary terms. No more: "so I have this topic which could go in these two forums equally well, which one should I pick."
So I gave it a try, I had already created a forum before, created some vocabulary and wanted to start posting topics. But off course my 'create new forum topic' kept asking me in which forum or container I wanted to post the topic. Mmm, what about those containers? Can a topic really only go in 1? So I wondered how they had implemented the Drupal forum, surely it must be using the taxonomy and views modules for it, since everybody says they're so great and powerful, Drupal's edge over the other cms' out there etc etc. But I guess you know, it's not (except for the Drupal version specification).
Googling: "Why is drupal forum not using taxonomy and views" got me to this post.
So I guess we're on new grounds here. And ok, so views is not core. But's let's do it, let's be bold and just start building forums using the taxonomy+views modules, maybe in combination with tac or modified forum access. Let's see what happens. About theming (not done any theming so far), couldn't you just clone any content type you like specifically for the forum topics and theme them however you like.
I'm interested to know if anybody tried this after the above discussion. What are the pitfalls?
B.t.w. Michelle, I love your tutorial on the user profiles, it got me started pretty well. Be careful with that changing 'edit' into 'edit account' though, I was editing views as an administrator the other day and it kept saying 'edit account' :)
Sorry for dropping this
I probably should never have posted this. I've got too much going on to really tackle this idea and likely won't until after 6 is out. I like the idea, but I have a lot of time invested in my forums and they are working and I really shouldn't be getting sidetracked at this point. If anyone else decides to run with it, I'd love to hear about it, though.
You've got me scratching my head about the "edit account"... What view are you editing where the first part of the URL is "user"? I haven't run into anything like that. All my views administration is under admin/build/views/something.
Michelle
Ok, so I made a view with a
Ok, so I made a view with a page and gave it an URL 'user/$arg/somerthing'. User 1 will then see 'edit account' instead of 'edit' when going to that URL, but I guess I should just not URL it like that, or not care about it (since it only happens to user 1), or change the if (arg(0) == 'user') part in template.php. Anyway, off topic, sorry.
Not getting sidetracked is a good idea.
Oh yeah
I forgot that you get view edit tabs on the views themselves with the latest version. Yeah, that makes sense, then. You might be able to put more conditions on the replace but, as you said, it might be easier to just not care about it since it's not something end users would see anyway.
Michelle
(Sorry, I know this is sooo
(Sorry, I know this is sooo unrelated to the topic but I can't resist... I've always loved your avatar, merlin. ; )
Breadcrumbs you could
Breadcrumbs you could probably put back in with the custom breadcrumbs module right? Not that I've tried yet.
Not using forum module would also allow for things like overriding the forum table view like you can with /tracker - adding in "last comment author", stuff like that. There's a lot of possibilities, especially with the potential the new outliner to replace books (say converting taxonomy terms to forums retrospectively, forum terms from multiple vocabularies).
making forums generic
it's definitely a good idea to make forums a set of views that can apply to any content type
i want to note that this is one step closer to the inevitable (imo) union of forums and og. og allows multiple content types already. why not add a forum view as an alternate to the default og_ghp_ron group home page view?
there are a lot of functions in og that would need to be disabled or hidden for it to function as a simple forum, and a small set of forums functionality that would have to move over to og (moving posts between groups? i can't think of what else off the top of my head)
but i think this would be a much more fruitful and extensible integration than, for example, og_forums which really doesn't play nice with either og or forums for many use cases.
My forums run like this
My forums run like this (without forums module). So does Journals (blogs) etc. I had to write a couple of helper modules for things like auto selecting the term (forum) if you select a "create forum topic" or any other content type (such as polls) that are associated to the forums vocabulary.
Unfortunately I haven't had time to maintain the site too well (I know of quite a few little bugs), but it's doing pretty well without too much attention from me. With views and custom template files soted out some seriously spiffy looks and lists.
The forum index page: http://darklight.co.za
The topics list if you click on one of the forums: http://darklight.co.za/forum/darklight
Most people hang in the recent posts: http://darklight.co.za/tracker
I should probably make the last two lists (tracker and the forums vocabulary view) more consistent. Maybe for Drupal 6.
Groups are also working (though for some reason http://darklight.co.za/og gives a page not found. Bands, Venues and Organisers' content types are groups and posts in them are also posted in forums.
Even with loads and loads of posts and a rather busy site, I do not use forum specific moderators but rather site-wide ones. Staff have a forum, but the talk in it is open for anyone to see if they click on the staff forum. I just leave staff topics out of the normal tracker and created a staff tracker for staff to stay on top on such topics.
One more benefit of moderators is that they play custodian and caretaker for a forum. My site stays lively because groups have the same sort of custodianship.
We only need a good gallery setup (with that "I'm here in the photo" functionality of Facebook) which I'm hoping to add one day when work abates a bit and an e-commerce solution that plays well or is completely based on CCK fields (CCK stock fields with a cart handler side block, CCK sub-fields so that sizing and attributes can be handled and stock checked, weight & size CCK fields with to tie in with checkout for postage and packaging and users as nodes to handle checkout).
I absolutely love the freedom CCK and Views bring to Drupal!
Wonderful forumless forum!
Nightwatch I'm inspired now. Your forum looks great! Having had no luck getting the forum module working with the new containers and categories. I think I'm gonna now try ditching the forum and going with a forumless forum.
Meg Lee Chin
http://megleechin.com
I think my inspiration came
I think my inspiration came from a long-time-ago forum where we were changing the forum structure. I was pretty new to Drupal still, having just come from phpbb. The moderators moved all the topics nicely to their new forums (the site was pretty busy with about 10 threads and many posts every hour, so it was done live). At some point we started deleting the old empty forums, I was off-line at the time. Next day I discovered all the topics got deleted too! If I remember, it had something to do with revisions of the nodes.
Had to decide to either keep tha last day's new posts or restore a backup. We went for the current material over the historic content, but many members were not too happy having lost so much of their work.
I'm thinking though, that the centralisation of content and Drupal trying to chase a years-old goal of forums, may not be the future of social networking sites. Groups is woefully uninteresting but may contribute. I see more successful social networking sites like Facebook and Last.fm decentralise their content to inter-user and grouped content. This also allows for sites to grow without the need for much staffing and policing. People just go to the content they want and are guided to such content through the people on the site they befriend.
Maybe the user taxonomies (I think I saw such a module somewhere) can be used for such things and may be used also for allowing users more access control over their own content. I also absolutely love the galleries on Facebook with the tagability feature. Would love to add that in the site's next revision.
Good luck with your forums!
If there is one thing
that I would like to see in Drupal most of all is extensive use of views and CCK. Include it in core and use it for everything!.
Our goal here, and what makes Drupal unique, is the generalization of the parts that it is made of. This is what the Node is all about. If this mentality isn't kept, we will see more and more contributed modules that deal with core functionality. Contributed modules should not deal with core functionality, but with very specific things. They should be considered add-ons. Views isn't an add-on, is it? It is how things are done in Drupal and it should be made into core for this.
So make the home page a view. Make the forum a view, make some of the administrative pages views. Let views list not only nodes, but also users, taxonomy terms, paths, forum containers and forums and so on.
Make users into nodes and let CCK handle the fields.
Half of the feature requests in contributed modules are about the integration of this with that in this way and another, which is then implemented in specific ways, which do not rely on the generality of the system.
Make Drupal core fit to provide solutions for as many different things as possible, but not by adding more and more little pieces of code that do specific things, but by expanding the core framework so that it could be flexible and serve many purposes.
Amen.
What about recipes from a functionality cookbook...
Just want to add my voice to what DawnLight has said. It should be the way that Drupal continues to grow. Forums should come out of a "recipe" where the ingredients are modules and configuration settings.
I'm very new to Drupal's ways but it could be that the formalisation/formulation/standardisation of these recipes is what's needed - how to combine and configure a set of modules to provide an instant forum, for instance. It's another abstraction but I think it would be useful to have for newbees that could then tweek and edit to get the results they want.
So, what seems to be lacking here is a recipe file that I can download that just builds the functionality that I want out of a set of modules - rather than having to build or download a specific module that I can't configure to much degree at all!
This recipe format may already exist. Is it a profile? I thought that profiles where for the whole install rather than bit of functionality.
See you at Drupalcon Barcelona!
Cheers Daniel
Profiles
Yeah, profiles are meant for new sites. I asked about using it on existing sites on IRC and the answer I got sounded like it would be beyond my skills to do. The best recipe I know of is a post a while back in this group that lists all the modules you need to do up a nice forum.
Michelle
New Drupal concept: recipes...
I guess the recipe idea is not just specific to forums but to any functionality that people want to see in Drupal. At the moment it seems that stringing together a bunch of modules has to be described in a verbose language. Whereas, what we'd really like is a simple script that we can run that would download all the modules we need (but don't yet have) and configure them to reward us with our desired functionality.
I'm going to stop ranting on about this idea because it's getting off topic. I hope to post it in a more generic group to do with future functionality.
Thanks for the inspiration...
Cheers Daniel
Nice idea
I like the idea but it's not something I have the skills to do. It also won't ever get into core because of security concerns. But maybe a contrib module?
Michelle
for a good forum in drupal,
for a good forum in drupal, you may want to check this "spanish" site...I understand the english version is in works...
http://www.esdrupal.org/foro/200709/como-coloco-la-fecha
Typical
Doesn't look much different than mine other than the color scheme. Typical phpbb look that you get from using flatforum and tweaking. That's not a replacement for forum. It's just theming.
Michelle
Not offered as a replacement
Not offered as a replacement to forum, just for both the looks and assembled functionality...imo, this is by far the most comprehensive (theming and functions combined) that I have seen...
Ah, OT then
I see, I guess I was assuming it had something to do with the topic of the post, which is replacing forum. ;)
At any rate, I'm not seeing what's so special about it... Yeah, it looks nice, but it looks like any number of modded Drupal forums. Other than the colours and the stars, which I haven't added yet, it looks exactly like mine and I don't think mine is anything special. :)
Michelle
recipe for forumless forum?
could anyone of the more experienced wizards (nightwatch? meg lee?)=be convinced to roll a small recipe for a forumless forum?
just a sketch of the basic steps. this would be great!
I setup a project to
I setup a project to coordinate development in this area: http://drupal.org/project/forum
It's not ready for production use; the primary lacking feature is the views themeing. Take a look! :)