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By Russell McOrmond on
I am wanting to set up a new site for a campaign to promote Commons-based peer production methodologies for governments. The other contender was phpBB as I really like that forum and have found that for campaigns like this that forums are the most important aspect of the site.
I am now posting a first message to the Drupal site and would like to know if this forum is a basic part of Drupal or an add-on module? Where can I learn more, such as the ability of users to use HTML or other markup tags (BBCode type stuff)? I tested with this message and HTML tags seem to work, so I am curious where I would learn more.
I am also wondering about aliases. I notice that most URL's seem to reference a node number and wonder if there is a system to allow me to assign specific nodes a different (more text based and memorable) URL.
Comments
This forum application comes
This forum application comes with Drupal as an official module. You may look at Downloads to check other unofficial modules (but consistant and working properly) to get the additional features you mention.
In the Documentation for administrators you may find more details.
I've got some experience with projects bases on phpBB. It is a great tool with lots of features, but the average users would use mainly the features that also comes woth a Drupal forum. In addiction o that (and possibly more important) in Drupal the forum is fully integrated to the rest of possible sources of content (stories, blogs, books, galleries...) but starting with phpBB or any other specialized tool you will have to hack to integrate the tools. It's not just the look&feel but core things such as the users management across all the applications.
Quick advise appreciated.
I am trying to quickly launch a site for a campaign that will run during the upcoming Canadian federal election. I've set up Drupal (finally) on http://test.digital-copyright.ca/ but am now wanting to jumpstart a few things.
First, how do I set up forums to have a look-and-feel like you have here. Is the menu at http://drupal.org/forum/ something the forum module builds, or is this something that comes from a different module? I want to build a forum list that will allow people to go into a electoral district specific forum (there are 308 across canada) to discuss with other people in the same district. I will essentially want a list that has the feel of http://drupal.org/forum/ but instead of "General" and "Support" will list "Canada Wide Forums", "Ontario", "Quebec" and so-on.
The second question is whether there is a quick template to create a module. I have an existing message archive program in PHP that I just want to wrap the Drupal look-and-feel around http://www.digital-copyright.ca/discuss/
Any help appreciated. Our election will be called very soon, and the faster I can get the site up the better chance we have of getting digital copyright issues (Anti-DMCA stuff) into the election.
BTW: Any Canadians reading this that are willing to help, please contact me!
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: FLORA Community Consulting
See this page
Russel, see this page in the documentation, describing how to create a taxonomy for your forum topics.
Taxonomy
Thanks for this tip. I ended up figuring that one out.
My /forum/ isn't working for reasons being discussed elsewhere
http://drupal.org/node/view/7863 . Turns out to be an Apache problem with mod_rewrite and not a Drupal problem. When I go to http://test.digital-copyright.ca/?q=forum I get the listing of forums that I expected.
Something I haven't seen yet is the ability of setting up moderators for different sections of the site. In my specific case I would like to deligate keeping information up-to-date for a specific riding to a person in that riding. Before I spend too much time looking it up, is this even possible?
Now onward to figure out modules.
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: FLORA Community Consulting
With extensive aliasing
Drupal also comes with extensive aliasing capabilities. You can alias individual nodes and particularly any URL with the path.module. If you know PHP and a lot about Drupal's URL schemes, then you can mass alias URLs, since Drupal allows developers to hook into the aliasing process.
BTW bbcode is supported as a contributed module (see 'Projects').