I'm experimenting with setting up a drupal web site, and would like to understand the distinction between stories and forum topics, so I can understand which to recommend creating for typical posts.
Both stories and forum topics seem to be things that have a title, body, and comments hanging off them. In fact, it seems that forum topics are just stories that happen to be created inside a forum (as opposed to stories that are created on the front page).
So, are there differences in them besides their name? The only one I could find was that new forum topics get listed under "new forum topics" on the front page, while new stories just get published. If they are really the same, why do they have different names? What I am missing in their different usages?
I find it counterintuitive that within a forum I can't post a story---eg, in our test system we have a forum for job postings, and my intent was to add each job posting as a story, but I instead had to create each job posting as a "forum topic" which seems rather heavy weight at least by the natural interpretation of the phrase.
Comments
Node system
The node system is Drupal's back bone which holds together all pieces of content such as stories, forum topics, polls, blog entries, and so on. In Drupal's world, such piece of content is refered to as a node. Often different types of content still share a number of properties such as some sort of title, an author, a creation date, body, and much more. Similarly, there are a number of operations that one wants to perform on any type of content. Example operations include adding a comments, querying access rights, categorizing content, moderating content, versioning content and so on. The node system capitulates on these common data elements and operations. Apart from these bookkeeping duties, the node system makes available a set of interfaces that make it possible to query and manipulate nodes.
So yes, stories and forum topics share many elements as they both build on the node system (they are nodes). The difference between 'story nodes' and 'forum nodes' is the way these nodes are organized and how they are presented to the visitor. In Drupal-speak, the word 'forum' refers to a 'discussion forum' (or 'discussion board'). I admit that this is not quite the same as a 'job forum'. For a 'job forum' you might be better of using stories organized using a vocabulary (taxonomy)?
Stories with Taxonomy
Using stories organized by taxonomy was indeed my original intention. But I didn't feel that job posting were worth cluttering up the front page. So I tried the obvious step of creating a story in the "jobs" category, but unchecking the "promote to front page" box. I was a bit surprised when I couldn't find the story anywhere! I had assumed that I would find it under the "jobs" forum since I had configured the taxonomy vocabulary I was using to be a forum vocabulary. But the story wasn't there, which gave me my first indication that jobs-the-vocabulary-term and jobs-the-forum were not the same thing. I found this rather counterintuitive and still do --- it seems very natural to me to identify the stories with term t as being part of forum t.
With some more poking around I was able to find some magic URL incantation that would let me see all the stories that were part of (.../taxonomy/page/...). But this URL is of limited use since no link to it seems to be automatically generated anywhere on the site. I suppose I could find out how to manually add static content to the page including links the various "by term" story subsets. But again, it would seem quite intuitive to have a page just like the "forums" page that would list all the topic terms and provide links to all the by-topic story subsets. In fact, why not just have this behavior in the forums page itself (again, expressing my puzzlement over why "forum" and "taxonomy term" have not been merged...
The Drupal Way
It might be helpful to look at one of the taxonomy navigation modules... (i.e. taxonomy_html, taxonomy_dhtml, taxonomy_menu, taxonomy_jsmenu, maybe others too) They provide "automatically generated links" to pages displaying only certain taxonomy topics. Of course, if you're not going to rearrange the terms you're using too often, you could do the same thing using the proper links in a static block (taxonomy/page/or/# where # is the term ID).
The forum module displays only forum topics. Similarly, the image module's "gallery" page displays only images; the weblink module displays only links. These modules ignore nodes of other types, even if they're classified under the same term.
The front page, on the other hand, can display any type of node which you "promote to front page." When you use the taxonomy syntax (mentioned above), it, like the front page, will display any nodes classified under that taxonomy term. (forum posts, stories, anything else)
The separation of node types within modules allows webmasters to have, for example, forum posts, images, and stories all relating to the same topic classified under a single term. Users can view a page with all these similarly-classified items grouped together (using the taxonomy URL syntax noted above). This feature, however, does not change the typical expectation that stories don't appear in the image gallery and that weblinks don't appear in the forum. A separation of types is maintained.
In short, drupal is content-centric, not forum-centric. Forum posts and replies are, to Drupal, just another type of content.
I'd suggest that you follow your original inclination to use stories, and use perhaps taxonomy_menu to provide a links to each taxonomy term in which you're posting jobs. If you're going to allow users to make job postings, perhaps you could use the translation feature so that instead of "create story," the menu item would read "create job posting" or something similar.
Tom
following your advice how do we manage our own links?
following your advice tom, how do we manage header links? say for example i want to add a link to all the music reviewed on my site. how would i make a link entitled, "Music" and then link it to as you put it, "a page with all these similarly-classified items grouped together (using the taxonomy URL syntax noted above)".
i would like to find, if it exists, or suggest, if it does not exist, a link management panel that allows an administrator to:
- create a header link to to a path that "lets me see all the stories that were part of (.../taxonomy/page/...)". for example, "Music Reviews" would go to ".../music/reviews".
- disable certain links in the Header Links Class such as the News Feed. I would rather move some links to a navigation block.
- order the links I do want displayed in the header links in a specific order from left to right.
- order the links I do want displayed in the navigation block in a specific order from top to bottom.
Clarification please
So what you're saying is that thee only difference between the two is that Forums are automatically populated into the Forum block for faster reference and stories have no default block?
forum node entries are uneditable
difference: how they are presented to the visitor - and the fact that forum nodes are not editable by author who created it
i want to be able to edit my forum topic - at least for its first hour in exitence if not permanently - this seems to be the most critical difference between a forum node and a story node
question1: is there any other layout difference as pertains to threading or can i just disengage forums altogether and still get a similar effect of forums using the story/blog nodes that do allow editing?
question2: can i make forum nodes editable?
forum nodes are editable
there is an "administer" link at the bottom of my forum posts in my 4.4.2 installation. What ver are you using? Maybe it was a newer feature?
I'm wondering the same thing
I've just set a drupal system up as a discussion forum site, and a user immediately wanted to know how to go back and correct a typo in a new topic. There doesn't appear to be a way to do it - not that I can see, anyway...
Jeff Markel
"All posts, including those with code, comments, and or opinions on this site are my own and do not reflect the postings, or opinions of Johnson and Johnson."
Getting the forums to work ok...
There are some discrepancies between the treatment of nodes as articles and forums.
Even though you can enable any vocabulary to include "forum topic" nodes, that seems to be a bug or a legacy option from previous versions, for you can only effectively publish forum posts to the terms created under the vocabulary you specify as the "forum vocabulary".
So, here's what I did and advise others to do:
1. go to your taxonomy and make sure that the "forum topic" node type is not selected under "Types:" for each vocabulary.
2. create a new vocabulary just for forums and select the "forum topic" node type under "Types:".
3. go to /admin/settings/forum
4. Select your new forum vocabulary as the "Forum Vocabulary" (it should be the only one available if you followed steps 1 and 2 correctly).
5. Click on the Save Configuration button at the bottom of the page.
and you're set to go.
Now, when users select create content/forum topic, they will only be able to post to the terms under the "forum vocabulary", which are the only ones listed under the /forum page.
I hope this helps others.
I read somewhere that v4.6 comes with improved handling of forums by the way.
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