I've ended up here after a long search for a open source CMS suited for my project's needs. From the very beginning my options narrowed to just a few applications: Joomla, Drupal and Ez Publish. Ez Publish it's simple and clean, commercially supported, but it doesn't have a community around it. Joomla has strong commercial support and a huge user and developer community, but it's code is extremely bloated. This is the ultimate reason that drove me to Drupal.
Now, as I'm evaluating Drupal, I see a lot of things missing, but because of it's clean structure I hope I'll be able to change or add them in the future. Still there is one thing I don't like and I won't be able to change/improve: the Drupal's build-in forums. Although I'm new to Drupal I already hate the forum system. That's because I'm used to the interface of the dedicated forum application like: PhpBB, vBulletin, PunBB, Simple Machines, etc.. The greatest thing about all these applications is a common user interface that's becoming a standard for forums.
I have read a bit here about people wanting to replace Drupal's BB system with other systems or integrate other systems here. Why? Most BB systems are bloated, difficult to navigate, and have a learning curve for those not familiar with computers. Drupal's is lightweight and achieves it's goal of easy communication between members. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to assign each registered user a personal forum upon registration.
I found this post while searching the Drupal forums and I think it shows the opinion of the majority of Drupal developers regarding the forum system. I want to clarify this, as I think I have the experience need as an advanced user of bulletin boards applications. It's true that most of the them are bloated, but I don't care about the applications now, I'm only interested in their common interface. The interface has a somehow steep learning curve for those unfamiliar with the computers, but that's because it's designed to handle huge amounts of information in an organized mode. This interface evolved over a great period of time and it was influenced by the users needs. This interface actually make the navigation extremely easy and natural, otherwise nobody would use it! You can call it a paradox, but that's why everybody prefers a more complicated interface to the lightweight one offered by Drupal.
Now that I've expressed my opinion about the nature of the problem I would like to share with you the solutions to it as I see them. I've started by looking at the solutions adopted by the rest of the CMS in the wild. And I've seen 2 approaches: create your own forum or integrate an existing one. I don't like the idea of the integrating existing dedicated forum applications into a CMS, because it would make it more bloated as those application were designed to work stand-a-lone. Moreover a forum is just another type of content that should be handled easily by a content management system.
In Drupal's case dropping the current forum interface it's not an options, because I'm sure it has many fans. The solution would be to have an official alternative to the current forum interface, one that follows the interface of the dedicated bulletin boards applications. This new interface would require a different structure than the one used by the current forum module in Drupal. The new module should treat all posts as regular content, like the rest of Drupal modules do. This way it can take advantage of the great framework offered by Drupal and can simplify the migration from other forum systems.
But to achieve this, the developers should stop arguing about the superiority of the current forum user interface and recognize their users needs. I've seen many posts in which users complain about the current forum interface and the lack of dedicated forums integration in Drupal. So there is clearly a need for a change!
The ideal forum would look like the one created by Gallery:
http://gallery.menalto.com/forum
Also UIE Forum looks promising and it would be great if it would support normal Drupal nodes as content for it's posts:
http://drupal.org/project/uieforum
I didn't started this topic to complain about the hard work so many people put into the development of this application. I just want to help improve Drupal, but right now I can't do much. I would really want to hear the developers opinion about this subject.
Comments
I suppose you realize...
That the Gallery forum is a stock Drupal forum, aided by the Flatforum theme. (Gallery website is Drupal) The flatforum theme helps to make Drupal's forum appear similar to popular forum designs.
You might also want to get actively involved with the druBB Group. They are working to improve Drupal's core forum, by adding in some of the missing features through modules or rewrites.
There are several issues
There are several issues with the forums and comment system, but I don't think they're fatal, and you shouldn't assume that nothing will change. The way the forum will change is if people submit bug reports/feature requests/patches for it - but as you pointed out, a lot of posts on the subject are people asking for phpbb/vbulletin etc. integration instead.
The default forum index is a tricky thing to customise with theming compared to nodes/taxonomy lists etc.. For example don't like the hard coded 30px 'padding' for subforums etc. - would be much better in css file, and when I get a bit better at phptemplate and can modify it I'll try to submit a patch for that and other small changes. However you spent most of the post talking about an alternative to Drupal's forum module, then linked to Gallery's which is based on it, so it can be done!
You should definitely take a look a the DruBB group: http://groups.drupal.org/drubb
There's no install profile available yet, but a fairly comprehensive list of forum related modules. Including stuff like flatforum, bbcode, quicktags and others which help it look and feel more like a standard web forum.
I wrote a long post a while ago trying to bring some of these issues together
Drupal forum
On first glance I didn't like Drupal forums, but after getting used to them I'm starting to appreciate their style. Recently I've been experimenting a lot with bbPress and Vanilla and although those are good it's a massive advantage to have a truly integrated forum out of the box.
extrapolation leads astray
I think you are extrapolating from new people who don't quite get Drupal yet. If that was true, someone would have contributed code to change the forum module long ago. No one who is actually has. From the various posts what you have is a lot of often new people angry that out of the box it is not phpBB or vBulletin. Drupal is designed to be modular and designed to be a base you add features too with other modules or custom code to make your site uniquely yours. See the forum handbook entry for a starter set of ideas on this approach.
I assume you know that Gallery's forum is Drupal forum module themed appropriately. Doesn't even look like there's any contrib modules helping either.
So all the above said, can Drupal's forum module use improvement? Sure. If you want to change or add to Drupal's forum module, then NOW is the time to be contributing towards Drupal 6. Once a given version of core has been feature frozen, any changes you want must go towards the next version of Drupal. Some major changes can take 2-3 versions to lay the ground work and refine the code to get in.
The next code freeze is June 1st. It would be better to submit code/patches earlier because then you have more chances for feedback and inclusion.
-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
However you spent most of
After writing such a big post I thought it was natural for you to assume I already know that. Actually, in my research, I've read everything I could find related to Gallery's migration to Drupal. And I think I've got a pretty good idea about what that process involved. I understood they had some problems with the migration and the integration of new features. For example the search through forums was difficult because the users replies to a topic are treated as comments. I've also found out they contributed a lot of code back to Drupal, which is very nice.
Here are some related articles:
http://gallery.menalto.com/page/welcome_to_the_new_gallery_website
http://gallery.menalto.com/node/60508
http://gallery.menalto.com/drupal_4.7_upgrade
Maybe I've got the wrong idea about this issues because I read some selective topics which didn't present any solution to this problem.
...
The origins and purpose of Drupal is different fro pretty much any other CMS and forum system. It's design and architecture are therefore going to require a fresh look at an objective rather then blindly copying another system. All that said read my post above about the development cycle and you could also check out the groups interest site on the subject.
Personally, I suggest you get more familiar with Drupal as a system (which I realize you are doing). Get caught up on the of it's origins and goals. Review the api's and the coding standards. Then start submitting patches for Drupal 6 and see what feedback you get.
-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