By jdevries on

Let me start by saying that Drupal is in many respects a great platform for the site I'm developing. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to have a bit of a love-hate relation with it, mostly due to the way how forum topics are integrated as ordinary nodes. Here the basic issue. I'm developing a site that needs to have two more or less distinct features:

  1. Article area - users can post reviews, tutorials, editorials and so on. Others users may comment on these articles.
  2. Forums - forums where all kinds of topics can be discussed.

Beside the default user roles I created an administator role that has access to all admin items and I created two supporting roles:

  • Editor - should review submitted articles to see if they are suitable for publication.
  • Moderator - should moderate comments on articles and forum topics.

But here is the catch: a forum topic is a node while replies to forum topics are comments. In other words, a moderator can only moderate the opening post of a forum if he has editorial privileges. Vica versa, I want editors to stay out of editing forum topics, but the way Drupal handels forum topics makes this rather hard.

The fact that Drupal visually integrates the forum seamlessly is admirable, as is the fact that it forum topics can be created from the create content area. The side effect, as far as I can see it, unfortunately makes it hard to provide the right tools to the right roles. That is, editorial tools to the editors, moderating tools to the moderators and access to settings to administrators.

Maybe I'm just missing the obvious. Maybe I'm trying to make my site too easy to work with (for both visitors and staff). Or maybe Drupal can't suit my needs afterall. Is there anybody who recognizes these issues? If so, how did you resolve them?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented

If you've not seen this, I'd give it a try asap since I'm pretty sure it does everything you're asking.

http://drupal.org/project/forum_access

kkkk’s picture

kkkk commented

I have the same problem, my website has now been delayed for a couple of months, because I cannot find a solution.

Forum is a very important part of the site, and my requirements are very simple and obvious:

  1. I want access to forum topics to be controlled by user roles, including comments and replies, of course.
  2. I do not want users to add comments to other contents, except where this may be specifically configured.

I have tried a number of advice from the drupal site, and now I have even rebuilt my site in drupal-5.1 just to have acl and forum_access (and stumbled over a number of bugs not found in 4.7), only to find that it's still the same.

Even with forum_access I find that only the first post in a topic thread is controlled, and replies can still be added by anyone who has access to post comments to the site. And you still have the problem with comments all over your site, just because you need them for the forum module.

I my opinion, all my work on taxonomy access and forum access is sabotaged by the comments module - and forum don't work without it...

Please someone tell me that I am wrong - it cannot be meant to be like that - and how to setup my forum and my site.

This is extremely frustrating.

Henning Hansen

vm’s picture

vm commented

in Drupal 5.1 the comment module has an administer comments permission, wouldn' this need to be checked ? for roles to be able to "administer" comments ?

kkkk’s picture

kkkk commented

Found in another topic http://drupal.org/node/139790 how to configure comments for contents types, under Administration > Content types (drupal-5.1) you can edit the comments settings for each type of content (e.g. story or forum). The options are Disable - Read only - Read/Write. This may be what I have been missing to control the use of comments in other parts of my site.

May not completely solve the forum issues...