Flat forum page style

Dang, you're moving fast on this Gurpartap!

I've been trying to test your patch and it looks like your taxonomy work-around breaks something in the forum_insert function.

notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$tid in /modules/forum/forum.module on line 449.

I'll test further tomorrow.

BTW I'm still interested in assisting with the theming side, if you need any.

Great work Gurpartap...and great to see someone push forward the forum.module at last. I just wanted to jump in and say I can help with testing at the weekend and will report back.

Looking good so far.

Dub

Good job, Gurpartap!

Two questions though:
1) Please rename the "add new comment" link of the first post to "reply", to be consistent with the links in the other replies.
2) Does your patch provide permalinks to each comment?
3) Does your patch support signatures? (Probably dumb question :))

I could help you with #2, I have working code for D5. Live demo at http://64.40.146.141/forum/general/general-discussion/60.

* Performance: does this add _user_get_posts($node->uid) to all node views? That would result in 10 extra SQL queries for many Drupal front pages. On a page with 50 comments, that might add 50 SQL queries. I'm sure that this will get us in trouble, especially because for most things, the result of these queries wouldn't even be used/displayed.

* #AABBCC: this looks a bit weird. If that's the correct color, I'd write #abc.

* + foreach ($form_values['taxonomy'] as $term_id => $term) {// NOTE: This($temp_array) is a workaround to get taxonomy module to work for forums. This code comment I don't understand.

I want to try and post something a little more thought out/organized tomorrow, so this is sort of a reminder for me and a nod to let Gurpartap know I haven't forgot about him. ; )

It's my belief that the total post counts for all the users of the posts being displayed can be gathered with a single SELECT and stored in an array that is made available to the template file for theming. I'll try to setup a Drupal 6 site tomorrow that I can work from to get at least some concept code up.

Everything looks great, though, and I'll be happy to make sure Comment Page and the new Private Message modules have instructions for integration.

Anyways... more tomorrow unless someone beats me to the punch.

Gupartap Singh, this looks great, nice one for taking it on.

@Wim Leers:

2) Does your patch provide permalinks to each comment?

Wim - the named anchorlinks for comments are great, we also have them on our site, but they aren't permalinks in a strict sense because if you ever change the number of comments per page, any links on paged comments will all change. http://drupal.org/6162 discusses it in more detail than you could ever want.

@catch: you're definitely right. They're not really permalinks. They're just direct links to comments.

Awesome work, Gurpartap! Needs to be re-rolled to take out comment-type.tpl.php since that was committed.

Also comments like this:

+ * @param $uid User ID count comments for.
+ * @param $option Return the count for comment or node. Defaults to the sum of both.

should be on two lines, the first with @param $uid and the second the description.

The post count thing is a thorny problem.... what about doing two things:
1. Adding a "user_post_statistics" table or something that stores the post and comment count for each user and is updated whenever a new post/comment is added or deleted.
2. Caching a static array of user post counts in the _user_get_posts() function... that way on a thread where two people were replying back and forth, you wouldn't be retrieving that value multiple times; only once per author...

subscribing

i would just add a num_submissions column to the users table which is the sum of all comments+nodes. we don't need a startistics table for this. in fact, we are actively working to get rid of node_comment_statistics.

Per webchick, a simple caching solution would involve a few extra lines...

function _user_get_posts($uid = '', $option = NULL) {
  static $posts;
  $output = 0;

  if (empty($uid)) {
    global $user;
    $uid = $user->uid;
  }

  if (!module_exists('comment') && $option != 'nodes') {
    return $output;
  }

  switch ($option) {
    case 'nodes':
      if (isset($posts[0][$uid])) {
        return $posts[0][$uid];
      }
      $output = db_result(db_query('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {node} WHERE uid = %d AND status = 1', $uid));
      $posts[0][$uid] = $output;
      break;
    case 'comments':
      if (isset($posts[1][$uid])) {
        return $posts[1][$uid];
      }
      $output = db_result(db_query('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {comments} WHERE uid = %d AND status = %d', $uid, COMMENT_PUBLISHED));
      $posts[1][$uid] = $output;
      break;
    default:
      if (isset($posts[2][$uid])) {
        return $posts[2][$uid];
      }
      $output = db_result(db_query('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {node} WHERE uid = %d AND status = 1', $uid));
      $output += db_result(db_query('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {comments} WHERE uid = %d AND status = %d', $uid, COMMENT_PUBLISHED));
      $posts[2][$uid] = $output;
  }

  return $output;
}

That said, I'm not convinced this is the way to go... or at least that more can't be done. For example, if you're displaying a forum thread, then you're going to know the nid of the thread. That nid will be the pid for any comment attached to it. Knowing those things, you can use a query that gets a list of all the user IDs you'll need to know post counts for on a page. Flatforum uses a post count table right now, but I see that that's trying to be avoided (hence the COUNT(*) queries)... so I'd like to figure out a query that could grab the count totals for all the users at once and cache those in the $posts array used above.

subscribing

subscribing

subscribe

Marked #225178: Forums shouldn't separate comments from original post like "normal" node content. as duplicate of this.

Subscribing as this should definitely make core.

subscribing

Subscribing! +1!

Great work so far. The forum module really needs to be updated from a themeable standpoint to look more consistent with other major forum software (phpbb, vbulletin, etc..).

IMHO, the forum module needs to be updated. With all the progress made with D6, Drupal forums seem to lack the basic features that most other forum software offers. I hope the Drupal maintainers stress a more feature rich forum module.

subscribing

@specmav, please take a look at http://drupal.org/project/advanced_forum for Drupal 6.

I agree with Moshe in #13 about adding a number of submissions column to the {user} table, it's useful data for lots of reasons.

@catch: I have looked at advanced forum and really like how it is progressing. I was just thinking that maybe there are some improvements that could be done in core to remove the need for adv forum or make it easier to implement a "glue" module.

I just think that a few changes to core, the forum module could act more like phpbb or vbulletin. The forum module hasn't really had any serious updates in a while. It still acts almost like it did in the 4.x series of Drupal (from an administrative perspective).

Maybe make it easier to theme the forum (I haven't started using 6.x yet) or maybe create a default forum-theme.tpl.php file in the base theme that looks more like phpbb/vbulletin to encourage themers to contribute.

I am not sure if these ideas are doable, I am just brainstorming for ideas to make drupal's forums more robust.

In that case, take look at http://groups.drupal.org/drubb and http://shellmultimedia.com/blog/advanced-forum-road-map which has various ideas about how to get some of this stuff into core. I'm very much in favour of improvements to forum - but speccing needs to happen either in groups or in new issues - this one should only deal with the flat forum page style.

I am actually a member of Drubb and I have looked at adv forum. Both are good starts. My problem with the DruBB idea is that it takes a ton of modules to even get something remotely close to the functionality of a working "Web 2.0" (sorry for the cliche) forum.

There are a few modules that personally I think should either consolidate of move into core:

Comment mover: I personally think that this handy administrative tool is useful and rather small file wise to add into comment.module.

Forum Access: Setting up moderators per forums is the de facto standard for practically all forum software. I also believe that if drupal core does one thing well, its node/permission access. Also private forums would be a plus.

I am not saying that everything forum related should be added to core. (plus it will never happen). I just think that forum.module needs a serious update to get on par with other forum software. A couple key important additions would help replace some of the module bloat some sites have when trying to build a advanced forum site with Drupal.

Also with views you could possibly create a table view for forums and with a few other adjustments replace the forum module. Granted thats a long shot, but as Views/CCK get better and more stable, it could end up replacing forum.module.

The forum module was created way back when CCK/Views either didn't exist or where in its infancy stages.

My 2 cents!

Cleaning up the issue queue.