Forum development

Is this group still active? Does it need some new blood? I might be interested.

Now that Drupal 7 is out, I continue to be embarrassed by the core Drupal Forum. In fact, I'm not even going to talk about the "Forums". What I want to see is a module that fosters building a Community. Instead of focusing on exactly which features Drupal Forum is missing compared to PHPBB or VBulletin (which is still a valid discussion to have), I would rather focus on something more fundamental: community building.

I think the following links should interest people that are looking for efficient solutions to improve their forum based on Drupal, only by using the forum core module (no Advanced Forum), and by respecting and following the strict modular logic of Drupal (modules, hooks, themes and so on).

Here are the articles:

• Drupal Tip #1: Add Smileys to your forum
• Drupal Tip #2: Message Quoting
• Drupal Tip #3: Post Advanced Formatting
• Drupal Tip #4: Add "Views Count" column
• Drupal Tip #5: Add a "Who is online?" block
• Drupal Tip #6: Add a breadcrumb to your forum
• Drupal Tip #7: Use Custom Thread Icons
• Drupal Tip #8: Hide Specific Forum Containers
• Drupal Tip #9: Theme Forum Topics
• Drupal Tip #10: Beautiful User Profile in Topics
• Drupal Tip #11: Friendly URLs in your forum with Pathauto

Note that we should publish new articles soon, and if you are interesting, I will update this discussion as well. The primary target of these articles was to explain how we improved the Discussion Forum of our Drupal website.

See also the Full List of Drupal Tips

I hope you will find our articles interesting and useful for your personal needs.

[Updated] June 16th, 2010: 3 new articles added.
[Updated] January 18th, 2011: 4 new articles added. List is now complete. Happy hacking!

When trying to import external forums into Drupal, I've found the main difficulty is a single fundamental difference between Drupal forums and the rest of today's forums.

It's the same one difference that for example makes common administrative tasks such as splitting or merging threads (while keeping chronological order), etc., easy in well-known forum systems but so difficult in Drupal forums, core and Advanced; difficult with Comment Mover, and even directly editing the database. Drupal forums are good and usable in most cases, with most normal functions similar to other systems but, for more advanced moderation, they are not yet ready.

Why? What's that basic difference? We can see it in the support forums of the currently most popular forum systems, such as vBulletin, phpBB, SMF, and Invision Power. Or we can install them and look at the tables where posts and threads are stored.

Drupal have modules for threaded and flat forums, so this is not the main difference. Most current forums are linear/flat by default, but part of them admit both linear and threaded display modes.

The basic difference is another one, truly simple but with fundamental effects:

I want that whenever user post for Jobs it will also add in forum for discussion.

Any help is appreciated.

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.

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.

Dear All,