Core forum
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.
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.
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.
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.
