Forum development

This is a working group for developing Drupal discussion/forum modules. "Forum" is interpreted loosely to allow for modern interpretations as well as traditional forums but is aimed at providing a space for longer lasting discussions rather "instant messaging" or status updates. Currently covered modules are Forum (in core), Advanced Forum (contributed module that builds on core Forum), and Artesian (new forum module) but other modules are welcome as well.

Anyone with an interest in creating forums in Drupal is welcome to join in the discussion. This is not, however, a support group so please use the issue queues and Drupal.org's forums for support requests. Also, please do not post jobs in this group unless you wish to hire someone to work on forum development that will be contributed back to the community.

Cleaning up the forum module queue

Posted by liam mcdermott on February 5, 2008 at 6:34am

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

Posted by liam mcdermott on February 2, 2008 at 7:42am

From the wiki:

Most of this will be dependent on Views core going into D7 core.

D7 Core forum development wiki

Posted by catch on February 1, 2008 at 7:38pm
Last updated by DavidMorris on Sun, 2015-10-11 02:56

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.

Drupal 7 core forum module - plan of attack

Posted by catch on February 1, 2008 at 7:22pm

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.

Advanced Forum Module Master To Do List

Posted by michelle on January 24, 2008 at 9:07pm

Note: This list is no longer being updated as the to do list is soley in the issue queue.

Last update: March 13, 2008

KNOWN ISSUES
5/6 Last post doesn't recognize shadow posts (core forum issue)
5/6 Bleed-thru from theme makes unthemed forums look funny
6 _is_forum needs to take into account node types other than forum.
6 Mark all read needs to work on node types other than forum.
6 Mark all read needs menu code implemented
6 Make caching work on last post fetching

DOCUMENTING

Icon for new comments in forum

Posted by robotjox on January 1, 2008 at 12:46pm

Currently it is to my knowledge not possible to show with icons if a subforum contains new comments - it's only possible to show new topics.
This is pretty standard functionality and a feature a lot of users have asked about on my sites.

It's just nice to have a quick overview of activity in all forums on the foum listings page.

I asked around for a long itme in forums and on irc, but nobody had some ready-to-go code snippets, so I eventually set upon doing it myself.

Show parent forum in tracker

Posted by liam mcdermott on December 28, 2007 at 4:43pm

We've got a /tracker menu item to show new forum posts. Great. Only problem is it doesn't show the forum the topic is posted under, my first thought is that this could easily be fixed by using a view instead of the tracker. Problem with this is that views can't show whether there are new posts in a topic. So should I:

ul>

Patch tracker.module to include the category (can't see this getting into Drupal core somehow);

copy tracker.module and customise it (then hack it every time a new version of Drupal is released: yuk);

Any experience with multiple forums?

Posted by skizzo on November 16, 2007 at 3:11pm

I apologize if this is not the right place to post this message, but I thought that here I may find Forum module experts that can answer my question.

Advanced forum module wiki

Posted by michelle on November 14, 2007 at 3:48pm
Last updated by DavidMorris on Sun, 2015-10-11 02:53

This wiki is intended to be a spec document for the new advanced forum module. The goal of the wiki is to gather together all the module lists, wishlists, hacks, etc that are scattered across both g.d.o and d.o into one place and organize them into a "to do" list for the module. It is a work in progress, so please feel free to add to it.

To do (incomplete list)

Show whole thread when replying
Put link to tracker on top
Change "add new comment" to "reply" to match others (Update: Done)
Jump to first unread
Add view counter to topic list
Add last comment to forum overview

Forum enhancement module

Posted by michelle on November 12, 2007 at 2:09pm

So many people have said they are going to improve forums and then we never hear from them again. I finally had enough of waiting for someone else to do it and I'm taking up the job myself. I started working on it yesterday, basing my code on flatforum. This module is intended to replace flatforum, which I think has reached the end of life.

Intergrated with Discuz!

Posted by belief on October 22, 2007 at 4:45am

I don't think that it works this moment..as it was licensed and haven't created a module for it.
The administrator of Discuz! crossday also said that he didn't have time to develop it!!
Hope that in the future.

Spanish Installation Profile of a Drupal BB

Posted by Cross_and_Flame on September 4, 2007 at 8:42pm

NOTE: I have no idea who these people are, just found them on a thread on drupal.org.

Some folks have come up with an installation profile and downloadable fileset of what they call a DrupalBB.

LINK: Distribucion-drupalbb

Here's the installation instructions: LINK

The future of flatforum

Posted by michelle on August 9, 2007 at 8:03pm

For people who like the look of forums like phpbb, flatforum is a great leg up on the theming. Unfortunately, the maintainer has gotten busy and is unable to continue with it. See http://drupal.org/node/165915 . I don't think I'm a good choice to take it over because my php and theming skills aren't that good, so I wanted to post this and see if anyone out there is willing to step up.

Comparison of current forum software

Posted by Halca on August 6, 2007 at 11:21pm
Last updated by choster on Mon, 2010-11-22 19:24

Just as another plan of attack, i decided to get a sexy table to list the differences between forum software so we can then draft up a complete list of features we require. So, please -- edit this page to add in a DruBB column so we can see EXACTLY what we need! :)

New module to assign titles to users

Posted by merlinofchaos on July 29, 2007 at 6:37am

Last week I created a module that's popular with forum communities; it allows titles to be assigned based upon post counts, as well as arbitrary overriding of the titles by administrators.

It requires work at the theming layer to expose these titles, though I saw some mention that flatforum may offer automatic integration with the module if it exists. If so, that would be really handy.

See http://drupal.org/project/user_titles

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

Posted by rconstantine on June 30, 2007 at 4:04am

With all the work going into fixing the core forum module, you might not be interested, but...we're working on a new og_forum module. The dev version of the 2.x branch is available now, though the latest tarball won't be ready until late Friday/early Saturday.

I look forward to all of the work you guys are doing on the core forum module and can't wait to modify og_forum to work with it.

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

Posted by kreynen on June 7, 2007 at 9:53pm

David Strauss started a great discussion on the development list about one-to-one tables this week that could impact comments and potentially forums... since, as Dries points out, forums is one of the 5 core modules that use the node_comment_statistics table David wants to eliminate.

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

Posted by Gurpartap Singh on June 7, 2007 at 7:20am

The issue is at: http://drupal.org/node/20295

It's the most awaited one after flat forums(coming soon!), and posting this one so that we can move on to flat forum one asap! Now, for this one, imagine you want polls to appear in your forums, this patch gets any content type in there, and likewise the possibilities to push any content into forums by choosing related category. Hopefully this much makes enough sense what the patch does. Will also post a port for Drupal 5.x, as requested by Michelle.

Issue link again: http://drupal.org/node/20295

DruBB - Proposals, Features and Funding!

Posted by MikeyGYSE on June 6, 2007 at 1:55pm

Okay,

I've been mulling this over for a long time now, Drupal's current forums simply aren't adequate. But what do WE as the community want from DruBB? What is it we need?

Personally:

Look and Feel - the forum needs to look and feel more ... natural it needs to be easy to use, let's face it forums are community tools, who has a community which contains users who can code HTML? Who can navigate confusing multi-level hierarchies? I certainly don't.

Getting our act together

Posted by dmitrig01 on May 29, 2007 at 12:17am

Let's face it. There will be no more forum improvements in Drupal 6 any more.
Let's get our act together and get truly organized, and that way, Drupal 7 can be an awesome forum machine.
I suggest we can organize ourselves into sub-groups, and that way more stuff would get done.
Some ones could be:
- Forum Studying: studying different forum packages, and see what they do well. (I would be willing to lead this)
- Bug Team
- Etc.

Let's get started now.

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