By LateNightDesigner on

Is there a way to create more than one forum? I run a student organization with multiple degrees represented and as we develope our site I was wondering if it was possible to create a couple more forums. I would prefer to have seperate forums instead of just containters. Or, could I focus containers on different pages? I'm still learning the drupal system and would like to avoid having more than one install. Any ideas? Thx guys!

Comments

LateNightDesigner’s picture

LateNightDesigner commented

Could I open up the module and say.. add a 2 to every variable that's forum dependant, and use that as a second one? hmm...

Still open to suggestions

Stephen Winters’s picture

Stephen Winters commented

Creating A New Forum

Assuming that you have the Forums module installed, on the side menu, go to "Administer" then click on "Forums".

Then in the right side of the screen, click on "add forum". Fill in the name of the new forum, and fill in the other detail. Also choose the parent of the Forum (which can be a container, see below). Click on Submit, and your new forum will be created.

Using Containers

Although you don't have to use containers, but, generally you would create one or more "Containers" to organize your forums. (The Forums kind of go "in" the containers)
The button to create the containers will also be in the right side of the screen, right by the "add Forum" button.

I hope that helps,
StephenW

LateNightDesigner’s picture

LateNightDesigner commented

I got the forum and container part down, no problem.

I was wondering if it was possible to only show a certain container for a certain page?

or have more than one forum.

I want a page for one group, and a page for another group, etc..

Not one huge forum. I'm trying to make it all easy to use instead of a large, hard to navigate one.

Sougent’s picture

Sougent commented

Hi,

You might be able to do what you want with only one forum page by using permissions to allow or prevent different users from using the forums. They will only see the forums you give them permission to see.

Joe

Sougent’s picture

Sougent commented

Hi,

I forgot to mention that each container can be displayed as a discreet page because each container is a separate node.

You'll probably have to tweak it to get it to look like a forum, though.

Joe

LateNightDesigner’s picture

LateNightDesigner commented

Yah, I'd like to display each section as a seperate node.. hmm, that would work....

Oh, I see. Set it up as a huge forum, and designate menu links to just the categories... ...'forum/2' , 'forum/6' , etc..

That's not a bad idea. It automatically looks forumish. Thx Sougent. That was a good idea I didn't even think of. A touch of css... Excellent!

I'm still open to any ideas, of course. :-D

Sougent’s picture

Sougent commented

Hi,

Depending on how you structure it, you could write a php code snippet to create the links for your different sections and then you wouldn't have to update your pages if you changed something.

Joe

LateNightDesigner’s picture

LateNightDesigner commented

Hmm, yeah. I was worried about that when I was looking at the url structure. Thx for the thought, Joe.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Turn on path module, then URLAlias the forums with nice names. Then when you mention the forums in links, there you have it.

-sp
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Drupal Best Practices Guide - My stuff Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

bonobo’s picture

bonobo commented

what you are asking, but it sounds like you are trying to do two things:
1. Set up a few different vocabularies for Forums; and
2. Limit access to some forums based on role.

For 1, you *can* set up multiple vocabularies for forums. Just go to admin/taxonomy/add/vocabulary, add a second vocabulary for forum types. IMO, this is clunky, and multiple containers holding multiple terms works better.

For 2, try taxonomy_access module -- this lets you set role based access to your terms (ie, your forums).

I hope this is helpful.

Cheers,

bonobo

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LateNightDesigner’s picture

LateNightDesigner commented

Yeah, I'm restructuring our forums now to hold containters in containers so that we can have purely sectional areas. Then I can set up menu links to those containers that pretain to each degree.

I want people to have free range of all the forums, actually. It's just people tend to favor their own degrees. So I was offering them a way to do it easily :-)

Thx for the module idea, bonobo.