Posted by linulo on March 22, 2010 at 5:10am
Something I always wanted to do but never found the time for is creating an install profile for Drupal that would install a ready-to-go forum that is similar to what you get if you install a forum software like PHPBB. I found that many webmasters use PHPBB just because it is easy to set up, even if they know that they want to integrate more functionality that is difficult/impossible to realize with a dedicated forum software.
The aim of this project would be to create an install profile that provides the following features compared to the standard Drupal install:
- Only forum and forum-related modules activated.
- A set of forum-related contributed modules like advanced menu, bbcode and smileys.
- Settings that are similar to the default settings of other forum software like flat comment layout.
- (If needed) A theme that makes the forum look like other forum software.
I do not want to apply to participate in GSOC'10, I just want to submit this as an idea in case somebody considers this worth doing.
Comments
Three months?
If someone wants to file this as an application then it needs to be fleshed out with some sort of roadmap milestones etc because it's not clear what takes three months here.
I can see 3 months
There's plenty of work there to fill out 3 months. Beyond assembling the modules and writing the glue code, a lot of the modules need some love. Quote, especially. And I could use help getting AF 2.x finished up so it can be used in this rather than 1.x which I'm trying to deprecate. :)
I'd love to see this happen and would be willing to work with whoever wanted to take it on. Also would be good to contact the Sony folks who are behind the rather stalled DruBB.
Michelle
Isn't
Isn't http://drupal.org/project/drubb exactly what you describe?
Some additions
@chx: I agree, sorry for the sketchy description. I try to be more specific. The project would consist of four tasks:
Task 2) and 3) can be very time-consuming depending on how elaborate the results are you are aiming for. As a roadmap I would roughly estimate 1 week for task 1), 3 weeks for 2), 5 weeks for task 3), 2 weeks for task 4) (because it involves some testing) and another week for documentation.
@dereine: I don't think DruBB ist quite there yet. The effort of this project could well be incorporated into DruBB.
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I can help with #1. I assume you mean Advanced Forum there? :)
#2 I wouldn't spend too much time on. Better to just make a style for a popular contrib theme.
#3 is where the real chunk of time would be. In fact, creating a forum administration module could be a whole GSOC project right there. It's something merlinofchaos was going to do but ended up not being able to. If anyone wants to tackle it, they should talk to him about it.
#4 is quite a project, too. The last time I looked at install profiles, they were none to easy to do. You should also consider making it a package of some sort rather than an install profile because most people will want to add a forum to an existing site and an IP forces you to start from scratch.
Michelle
hm
typically, what you're describing in #1 has taken place before SoC, so you could actually flesh out the goals and timeline before SoC has started. That way, you can spend your time coding
for #2 - we've had themes take up whole summers, so I'm not sure if this is doable.
I would hop onto IRC and have a discussion with Michelle - I'm sure she'd be happy to help you expand your proposal.
Michelle, I am very impressed
Michelle,
I am very impressed with Advanced Forum and use it on a number of my Drupal sites already. I would be interested in doing a GSOC project relating to forums, which I see as a very important part of many different community and business sites. Can you think of anything else that needs attention in the forum/drupal relationship?
I think that the theme isn't too important either, because most sites want to use their own CSS rules and things, and Advanced Forum provides a number of great classes and ids for it's output, along with some good default css 'themes'.
Also, I can see the benefit of an Install Profile coupled with a forum administration geared backend, for someone who is looking to quickly install a forums site without having to upload all of the modules and configure them. Of course, the modules would still be available for people with existing sites to install.
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting
Needed bits
A decent administrative area for the forum is sorely needed. Things like moving/pruning/merging threads are very difficult. merlinofchaos has a lot of ideas in this area and it would be well worth talking to him if you want to take that on as a project.
Another thing that's needed is performance enhancement. There's some bad queries in there for starters. There's also no concept of archiving that some forum software has. If you have huge forums with hundreds of thousands of posts and are using nodecomment, that's a big strain on the node table.
Beyond that, there's a lot of small things and I don't know if any would make a good whole summer project. It's been a while since I compared what stand alone software can do against what AF + other contrib can do so I'm not sure if there's any other major holes.
Michelle