Articles about how to improve Drupal forum

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lastnico's picture

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:

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!

Comments

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Michelle's picture

I can see the first 3 because they're basically just adding modules. But if you're going to start getting into complex changes like #4, why not just use AF that has it built in already?

Michelle

Simply because we think that

lastnico's picture

Simply because we think that all features available in advanced forum are not necessary, and these articles are a good start point to discover and improve, step by step, the Drupal Forum core module.

Only local images are allowed. http://www.forum-software.org (Drupal 6.16, CCK)

Fair enough

Michelle's picture

For people who mostly like what core forum offers, AF may be overkill. But you do reach a point of diminishing returns with maintaining your custom code to do the same thing an existing module does. Keep in mind that AF exists because I've already gone down this path of improving core forum, first with adapting the old flatforum module and then adding more and more snippets like these until it got to the point where I extracted all my customizations out of my site and put them in a module for everyone to use.

Michelle

I agree with you, writing our

lastnico's picture

I agree with you, writing our own code is not a good idea for two reasons: you have to maintain it along the new releases, and more over, you don't share it with the community. The Advanced Forum project is really good (we talked about it a lot in the Drupal Forum Review, but these snippets are just a way for advanced users to bring some new features or appearance improvements to their forum by little strokes.

Only local images are allowed. http://www.forum-software.org (Drupal 6.16, CCK)

Just for info

lastnico's picture

I've added 3 additional articles: Drupal Tip #5: Add a "Who is online?" block, Drupal Tip #6: Add a breadcrumb to your forum and Drupal Tip #7: Use Custom Thread Icons.

Only local images are allowed. http://www.forum-software.org (Drupal 6.16, CCK)

a view from a noobpoint!

marko3's picture

Hi, lastnico, I just went through first 3 steps. I intended to use your tip in step 4 if I could, while AF and AF additional themes were installed. Then I found some abnormalities in columns display, so I just removed suggested template.php hack, and deleted forum-topic-list.tpl.php. As far as I can remember, uninstall/install AF had no effect to alleviate the problem.

Then I noticed that since VIEW count and Breadcrumb are already provided by AF, I see little reason to follow #4 onward. After all modules are there to minimise hacking code, unless there are some overkill AF that I fail to see ;)

I am actually trying to customize your lovely style.css. However if would be better if you could specify where it should be applied, if one uses AF. It took a series of trial and errors to know that I should apply it to my theme's style.css

Tips #1-3 were invaluable form me. Thanks dude.

Thanks!

lastnico's picture

Yes indeed, this series of articles have been written on the assumption you are not using AF, and you may just want to customize some parts of the Drupal core forum module. I however think you can still integrate the given style.css snippet, but you'll have to integrate it with the #id, .class and so on from AF.

Only local images are allowed. http://www.forum-software.org (Drupal 6.16, CCK)

Great articles.

gilzero's picture

Hi lastnico,

The articles are very helpful and give me a lot of inspiration of customizing (not only to the forums).

Thanks.