I had partial success integrating [Advanced] Forums into Open Atrium.
I have enabled the Forum module in the original OA distribution, then installed and configured Advanced Forum.
After that, I had made the Forum content type Space Aware and Section Aware + all the other steps as per this tutorial (the tutorial shows how to integrate another type of content, but the steps work perfectly for Forum too):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfStOxR9p0s
As a result I am now able to create a Forum Section inside a Space.
The content of the Forum Section is fetched by the view which lists the forum topics (the view was adapted to be Space and Section aware as per the youtube tutorial, so it shows only the forums of that specific Space and Section).
Users with the right permissions can create new topics or reply (=comment).
But here is where I got stuck: clicking on any of the topics actually opens the normal [advanced] forum thread page (styled according to the options of the Advanced Forum module). That page consists of the initial message + replies + the reply form and nothing else.
That means the Section sidebar with everything interesting in it is gone (no option to notify certain groups, teams, etc).
Any idea how to make the Section sidebar show?
Thanks a lot!
Comments
Open Atrium use Panels and
Open Atrium use Panels and Panelizer to do the layout of its pages (also the Panels submodules In-Place Editor and Mini panels). Take a look at admin/structure/panels for Panels and admin/config/content/panelizer for Panelizer, at admin/structure/mini-panels for the Mini panels. The In-Place Editor is one of the possible 'Renderers' of the panels.
Here is a good video tutorial series to learn more about it:
http://nodeone.se/en/learn-page-manager
In summary for your use case, you will have to discover what is the page template that page manager has to override with a new variant and there choose the panes that you want to appear in it.
'the Section sidebar with everything interesting in it' is a group of several panes.
You can take a look at the panes of a section at:
node/%/panelizer/page_manager/content
(with % as the node ID of a section).
Narrowing down the issue
The Sidebar is indeed made of several panes and the way to "bring it back" would be to add those panes to the page which renders the forum node.
As far as I could see, once the Advanced Forum module is installed, it brings its own Panels page, listed as "Forum page" in /admin/structure/panels.
That page has 3 variants: one for the top level, one for containers and one for a single forum.
I tried to change the layout for those variants, adding the panes of the sidebar, but nothing happens. And actually that is normal, since each of those variants is actually a sort of view which lists the forum hierarchy at different levels (all the containers, the content of a container and the threads of a single forum).
None of those variants deals with rendering a single forum thread. A single forum thread is made of the first post + comments to it (and maybe comments to comments, etc).
So I think I need to create a panel page which renders a single thread, and add the Section sidebar to it.
And that is where I am stuck. How do I create such a panels page?
Solved!
The solution was to use the Panelizer in order to create a new way to render a single forum thread.
The first step was to choose a layout with two columns, one for content, one for the Sidebar.
The second step was to sift through the possible panes in the "Page Content" set of panes. The pane I needed was called "Rendered node". It renders everything nicely, using the themes provided by the Advanced Forum module.
Thank you paean99 for the hint!
Glad it worked for you.
Glad it worked for you.