By JennR2000 on
After testing on a demo site it seems that 5.0 did nothing to improve on the forum module. The forum module is constantly being brought up as needing to be improved upon but nothing seems to change. Is it even possible to make Drupals forums function like real forums (IE phpBB forums and other standard internet forums). Does anyone have any examples of a drupal forum skinned to look like a real forum and that it has the functionality of one as well.
Comments
The support forum of the
The support forum of the gallery project is done with the standard drupal forums http://gallery.menalto.com/forum
The forum under http://www.unreal.ie/forum is done with the UIEForum module.
What do you think is missing in the drupal forums? What could be done to improve it?
shhhhh
People only get angry when we point out that you can add contributed modules to enhance the functionality of Drupal's forum.
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/forum has several suggestions to start people out.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
I wonder
I wonder about posts like this. Drupal isn't primarily a forum platform (anymore), but it does provide basic forum tools.
I took a look at this http://www.phpbb.com/features.php - and didn't find too much missing beyond the access control. Just about everything else looks to be doable in drupal as-is. And the things that are missing have been addressed in contrib modules.
BUT - i'm not a bb/forum admin - so I really don't know how 'bad' drupal is in this regard.
Given PHPbb's feature list - can someone provide a detailed analysis that compares the two forums feature by feature? Which has which feature. Which feature is 'easier' to use on which platform?
andre
If you want to hold up a
If you want to hold up a standard of a "good" forum, in my opinion people should be looking to Invision Board instead. As far as features go it is way ahead of something like phpBB and all of the other ones.
But in answer to the question posed, Drupal is largely about scratching your own itch - Drupal will have a better forum when people decide that they'd like to work on improving it and start contributing designs and code towards that end. If you look at a lot of the features that made it into 5.0 they made it in not because some direction came down upon high from Dries, but because people wanted to solve a problem (e.g. Forms improvements came about because of the desire for automated forms, theme improvements from professional theme folks, etc)
===
BuyBlue.org | The Blue Fund
You don't want forum.module
Forum.module provides everything you need for a discussion forum. If you want a community based around a discussion forum, you need more... like private messaging, user titles, statistics, profile fields, etc. These can be provided by other modules and will integrate seamlessly with all of Drupal.
--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.
Why forum.module is bad
Using comments as follow ups in a thread is not a good idea : because
- it's an headache to administrate :
-> it involves 2 separate modules (two sets of permissions),
- and follow ups ARE NOT comments :
-> they do not need big titles,
-> they must be written quickly by default (no xhtml, wiki style is good)
Forum posts ARE NOT nodes :
- you'll might want permission on forum to be different than on your site contents...
- you don't want all your 10000 posts to mess with you're 10 page of content in the list of content.
-> you don't need a workflow for forum post. Having it is really painfull...
- you'll want to have a normal thread list...
Some concerns are about default display of some information, and this can be changed (gallery2 solutions?). But others need a full rewrite to break the correspondance node=forum head post... and comment=forum followups...
DRUBB group
There is an active Drupal group that is taking a hard look at forums in Drupal (http://groups.drupal.org/drubb). Take a look at the discussions that took place on the pro's and cons on using current modules vs. developing a "complete" drupal forum from scratch. (tounano started this coding already). There is also a discussion on integrating a 3rd party forum vs. a new forum vs. current forum+modules.
Get involved and help solve this nagging problem!
The only feature I miss
I'd like to have a more powerful forum module inside drupal but current is right. Maybe some external modules could be added as core modules like forum permissions.
I searched a lot and I didn't find one feature: mark posts with loged user participation with different icon.
Here is my forum if you want to take a look: http://pixelgordo.com/foro/tema/104