Tools to improve online discussions towards collective intelligence
Dear all, I just want to share some few links about tools which help improving online collective conversations with the aim of fostering collective intelligence.
Develped inside FP7 european framework's Catalyst project, there are some cool tools.
ASSEMBL, LITEMAP, DEBATEHUB, EDGESENSE
Read moreScalability of a forum with node access
Hello,
I'm looking for a forum solution for a Drupal site. This forum must support moderating. Is there any lightweight solution, or is the forum access module scalable? Last year I had problem with a node access module. Is it correct that Forum Access sustains the same issue?
Do you know any big forum (a few dozens of thousands of nodes or more) that uses the Drupal forum?
Thanks.
Read moreArticles about how to improve Drupal forum
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!
What's the basic difference between Drupal forums and standard forums?
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:
Read moreBenefits of Drupal Forum over third party for newspaper site!
Dear All,
Read moreIs the core forum module still needed anymore?
I know that I will most likely be wrong about this, but with the advancement of CCK, Views, OG and Panels, is the forum module really necessary anymore? My idea being is that with all these "practically core" modules, isn't it feasible to create a forum with just these modules?
I can create a content type called "forum post" manually, set the taxonomy for the forums (granted containers would be an issue) and use views to custom tailor the data shown to the users. I can already create 8/10th's of the forum functionality with just that scenario. Unless I am missing something.
Read moreCleaning up the forum module queue
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. :)
Read moreViews in Core and forum.module
D7 Core forum development wiki
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.
Read moreDrupal 7 core forum module - plan of attack
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.
Read more