Ok, I am dealing with a customer requirement and do not have a lot of room on this. They want a "chat" or discussion area that is similar to an existing site. It is a very simple chat area with no forums, just one main area where people can post topics and reply to them. It is also for an audience that is not very computer literate. I have been working with the forum module (since it is the obvious choice), but I am going to get some push back on the fact that you have to create a forum that people have to go into, rather than having a single default chat area.
My solution was to just use stories. I could tag their stories with a default taxonomy term and then use taxonomy to provide a paged list of topics. The only problem is that I need to remove the teasers, but I think I can figure that out. Here is my big problem: How can I provide a decent breadcrumb? For example, If a user enters a topic (that is a story for Drupal's purposes) they can add their comment. Now, how can I provide a link back to the list of forum topics (the taxonomy term for Drupal's purpose) that also takes paging into account? If they navigate to the second page and then read a topic and add a comment, they are going to be frustrated if they cannot get to the list of topics they are on, for example if they are paging through the topics.
So to summarize the issues I currently have:
1. Does anyone have a great way to remove teasers? The only thing I've come up with is to hack the module code and insert extremely small teasers as an option and provide a one line teaser. Could I create a teaser of 0?
2. How can I provide a link back to the last page they viewed for the taxonomy term? For example, if they were one page 2 and they enter a story and add a comment how can I provide a link at the top of the page that will take them back to page 2? Hitting the back button is not a good solution because that would cycle them back through all the pages they used to add the comments.
3. Is there an easy way the change the size of the text area used to post comments? (I need it smaller)
Also, just thinking out loud, if there is a way to "simplify" the forums module that would work as well. I guess if I could modify the forum breadcrumb to remove the first few options, I could provide a menu link that would drop them into the chat area and that might work. Does the forum module accomodate paging for topics? (I have only played with it and never gotten enough content that it came into play)
Thanks,
Samuel
