Planned Features and Getting Other Devs Involved

When I first started this, nearly two years ago now, I had fully intended for this to be the premiere Drupal forum solution and certainly planned to welcome contributors and make this a community project once I had sorted out the foundation. Since then, life has had some unexpected turns and I found myself leaving Drupal for long stretches of time and Artesian was continually put on the back burner.

At this point, I am trying to get back into the swing of things but it's not like riding a bicycle; there is a lot of re-learning involved to get back up to speed. I've been going through the module and trying to remember how everything works and being baffled at a lot of the code I wrote. It's a slow process, but I'm getting there. I'm hoping to be able to make more commits soon (the last one was catching up stuff from last summer that was never pushed).

Once I get it moving, I'm going to try very hard to work on it frequently enough that I never have this huge hurdle to get back to it again. Even so, I don't expect my progress to be quick as many of the issues that kept me away are still not resolved and I am still struggling to get some order in the chaos.

I am also neither in a position to be an effective project manager nor do I want to be a bit player in the project. Therefore, I think it is best that, if there are people really chomping at the bit that want to get together and get stuff done, you just go do your own thing. I won't cry foul about duplication when I clearly am not producing in a timely manner. I know this path isn't The Drupal Way but it's the path I must take for now. Hopefully there will come a time when I am ready to have a community led project but, right now, I just need to be able to work on this at my own pace and do my own thing. Anything else is likely to drive me away from Drupal permanently.

Michelle

Of course there is dev code in Michelle's sandbox (Mud). About the community building on it, that sounds great indeed, however I think it would be her decision what to do with her code.

Michelle's ideas on forum architecture (see Artesian: Initial brainstorming) are really interesting and follow -much more than the old core forum- the standard of most well-known forum systems (vBulletin, phpBB, SMF, Invision Power...), by using forum, thread and post entities, which opens many good, flexible and versatile possibilities for a world class Drupal forum.

See also the planned Artesian: Feature set in the Forum development group.

A real problem with a large project like this, a complete forum system integrated in Drupal, is that, unless it's funded by for example interested customers, it cannot be done in the e.g. 8 hours working time because people need to eat, pay the bills, etc. Without funding it's going to be maybe done in the free time, which is shared with family and many other matters.

Funding would allow a developer like Michelle to do it in the working time, as she has recently mentioned. On the other hand, the current lack of funding probably means that, rather than individual work, a team of volunteers cooperating in their free time would be necessary for this extensive project.

Even when naturally, with the basis of Drupal available to build on, there is not any need to go to the complexity levels of forum systems such as SMF's 188,000 lines of code, or phpBB's 423,000 lines of code. But, even with the basis of Drupal, a modern forum system seems clearly a community work, preferably following the excellent standard architecture designed by Michelle.

All the code I've written has been released. If someone wants to take it and build on it, that's fine. It hurts to let go but I can't expect people to wait around forever for me.

@Michelle: If the forum development is being opened to the community, that could be announced in the Forum development group, to exchange thoughts on best ways.

Thank you very much Michelle for all your wonderful and pioneering work showing the road ahead. I hope you continue to do so, maybe not so much like before for the many small details, but at least for general guidance on main lines of development, architecture, etc.

@JakeWilund: The experimental code is still in Mud (Michelle's sandbox), and in drupalcode.org.

Reflecting the new situation/status, which could potentially have significant repercussions on the forum development.

See also "Current status" (June 13, 2013) by the maintainer Michelle, in the Artesian Forum project page.

Michelle recently announced (comment #6, 2013-06-21):

All the code I've written has been released. If someone wants to take it and build on it, that's fine. It hurts to let go but I can't expect people to wait around forever for me.

Before, during the Artesian Forum development work, Michelle -also creator of Advanced Forum- wrote (Artesian Forum progress report, 2012-01-06):

If my goal was simply to get an entity forum working, I could have had that done by now. But my goal is to make a complex and flexible but yet easy to understand and customize forum that will be as simple as possible to port to Drupal 8. That is much harder to do and takes a lot longer. (...) I do realize that perfect is the enemy of done and don't intend to tweak endlessly but I want this to be as solid a foundation as I can make it.

I have four years of experience writing forums for Drupal and so know where the pain points are, what was difficult if not impossible to do when building on top of core, plus the mistakes I made in Advanced Forum itself. I know so much more about Drupal now than I did when I started AF as well. With this background and the freedom of a complete rewrite with no legacy code, I believe I can make a much better forum that will finally meet my vision of a Drupal forum. It's going to take me a while, especially at the start when my constant refactoring makes it difficult for other coders to jump in and help, but it will get there and, I hope, will be worth the wait.

I think Michelle's experience and vision would be an important part to make the new Drupal forum a reality. However, let's consider all the different possible ways to this goal:

Plan A. Michelle continues to do all the development work.

This is now discarded. As mentioned already, she has recently announced on the Artesian project page (June 13, 2013) that it's currently not possible for her to dedicate time to the many details involved in the forum development. And there is no funding to do it in the working time.

Plan B. Another developer starts a new project based on Artesian's architecture.

This was already tried by Rasmus Werling with Brain Forum. In his Bachelor's Thesis Entity-Based Discussion Forum for Drupal 7, he says for example: "The database structure of the Brain Forum is greatly based on the plan earlier mentioned by Michelle Cox. There are, however, some modifications (...)"

This forum is working with a limited feature set but, also due to lack of time, the status in the project page is: "We are at the time being unable to develop Brain Forum further."

Plan C. The community builds on Michelle's foundation, and she commits and gives general guidance on architecture, etc.

Possible steps could be for example:

1. The current code is moved from Michelle's sandbox to the Artesian Forum project.
2. The community tests it, provides feedback, and submits patches.
3. Patches are reviewed and tested by the community, and maintainer Michelle commits them.
4. Later, if appropriate for the forum development, Michelle can consider co-maintainers/committers among those submitting good patches.
5. An outstanding open source Drupal forum, completely integrated and with the limitless extensibility of Drupal, is released.

Thoughts? Ideas?

I don't have any bandwidth for this until at least September. Any, at all. I just peeked at my tracker because I needed a little break from editing photos but I'm only here for 5 minutes and don't know when I'll look at it again. So don't count on me for anything any time soon.

I think the best bet would be for those interested in moving forward on this to simply start a new project. If you want to take my existing code to build on, that's fine, but I'll warn you that it's a mess. That's why it was in a sandbox. I was trying to learn entities and more advanced OOP and a bunch of other stuff while writing it so I was constantly changing things around as I figured things out. If it's helpful, though, by all means use it.

As for the name, though... I'm probably being silly but I'm really struggling with letting that go. I know I can't stop the project from being taken over since this is open source and all but I really would appreciate it if we could leave this placeholder for me and have you folks just make your own project. I'm probably being way too emotional about this but having this project here makes me feel like I have a place waiting for me if I am able to come back. (And, yes, I realize that, if you all do get a forum module going, that coming back to Artesian would end up duplicating effort but I'll sort that out if/when the time comes.)

Michelle

Hi! I'm currently working on an entity based forum distro (code to come soon) which in it's simplest form would be thread + post entities. Architecture wise starting out by looking at all the current solutions - both Drupal and outside of Drupal (Discoruse, vBulletin, phpBB, Invision) and have come out with a strong vision. Looking at Mud my method differs in key places.

It will comprise of the following, but not requiring anything other than core:

• Core (Thread & post entities, decent markdown editor, post quoting, listing views)
• Access control (offering of basic limiting access to a forum (taxonomy term) and implementing basically hook_node_grants but for the thread entity)
• Anti-spam measure (some decent defaults for preventing spam so honeypot)
• Comments bridge (measures to use Harmony as a commenting method, with this enabled say you create a news item you automatically get a thread created, and posts appear on both the news node)
• Messaging (private messaging but also notifications, if someone @username mentions you in a post you get a notification, if someone quotes your post you get a notification etc)
• Migrate (migrate methods for coming from core forum, vbulletin, phpBB, invision)
• Moderation
• Search
• Social
• Basic bootstrap theme.

I look forwarding to building all of this up and with a potential high profile project coming up which could use it I'm putting a lot of effort into making this a contender to other software offers let alone Drupal forums.

If you get some code going, make sure to link to a sandbox so we can help out. This really needs to happen.

My code can be found here though its not quite in a state to be checked out. Will put out a dev release when everything is in place.

https://drupal.org/project/harmony_core

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No, sorry, I don't have the headspace to try and do development right now.

I suppose, no sense keeping this issue active.