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By monkeyfarmer on
Drupal seems like a nice CMS but it has some issues and the one I hate the most is the forum. When I have problems I typically look for solutions in the forum or post. However, the Drupal forum has a search bar that makes it hard to search the forums specifically. Using something like Mybb, SimpleMachines or phpbb would make things much easier.
Comments
Easy fix
Searching only the forums is easy:
your subject here type:forumBy adding "type:forum" to your search, you limit results to just the forums.
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John Forsythe
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Not only that
If you open up the advanced search (http://drupal.org/search/node) you can search within specific forums (or any other category) as well.
That is much better than having a separate forum. If you want your search to include content from the forum as well as the handbooks or issue queues don't need to search in multiple places.
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Anton
New to Drupal? | Troubleshooting FAQ
Example knowledge base built with Drupal
The problem is...
How is someone to know of these options? I am not surprised that someone brings this up. The search is a powerful tool, however new users will not know these advanced options from the current search area.
-Craig Jackson
-Web Developer
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That has more to do with the theme and way we have it organized on drupal.org. I am always open to people providing documentation on features they feel are overlooked.
To the original poster, there are better ways to express your frustration then saying something sucks. Doing it in t hat manner tends to send up all sorts of red flags.
-Steven Peck
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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
Even if the search
Even if the search functionality exists, the forum just isn't very feature rich like some of the other open source solutions out there.
Most forums have the user info to the left of the body text which allows for more posts to be put onto the screen. The Drupal forum has it on top which wastes space. This means not many posts can be shown on the screen.
Also, I've found that my posts can't be subscribed to at the bottom of the message like most of the other solutions out there.
Anyways, I would love to see third party forum solution rather than the current one.
...
The core forums are basic. There are many modules that can be added to extend the basic forums. The user info stuff you are talking about is a themeing issue and there is an add on for that you can add to help mitigate it.
In the spirit of Open Source, scratch your own itch, Michelle is working on the advanced forum module to help mitigate this further and test feature sets for future additions to core. Drupal 6 has many improvements to permissions and content that you will also probably appreciate as well.
As to 'subscribing', if you mean on drupal.org, no we do not have that functionality. There are a number of reasons for it but there are contributed modules that do add this functionality to a site.
There is a track at the upcoming Drupalcon to discuss this as well.
There are one or two bridge modules floating around. There are not a lot of people reported as using them. Some of this is a philosophy issue regarding content and user management, some is a security issue as you end up expanding your security considerations a bit. Also, very few people expert in Drupal and innards of another forum system which tends to limit interest even further.
-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
Maybe I'm some sort of freaky genius
(actually I doubt that very much)
but for me it was just a case of trying a search, thinking "hmmm maybe I want to narrow that down a bit" ... then "let's see what we can find to do that" ... then "eureka! there's an advanced search link right there, maybe I'll try it to see what it does"
I'm not saying it can't be improved some more, but it really doesn't seem that hard to me. Anyone that struggles with figuring that out is going to have a hard time building a website.
I'm sure if those options were showing permanently then there'd be a flood of complaints about overly complex interfaces. After all most searches wouldn't need those options.
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Anton
New to Drupal? | Troubleshooting FAQ
Example knowledge base built with Drupal
Try this at the google home
Try this at the google home page:
"your search term" site:http://drupal.org
That will give you very precise results.
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http://www.bwv810.com/
I am a writer and researcher. In my spare time I build websites with Drupal.
Je peux communiquer en français. / Я могу общаться на русском языке.
I must say...
I rather like the Drupal forums. No singing and dancing smiley animations, no massive images or grotesque signatures, or poor-contrast color schemes.
As others have said in this thread: don't assume that the Drupal.org forums are the limit of what can be accomplished with the forum module. The forums here are simple for their own reasons