Forum modules to bundle [#62867]

I recently submitted a new module, forum_admin_links.module, that may be more useful as an enhancement to flatforum.module.

forum_admin_links.module provides menu callbacks to support one-click administrative actions for (un)locking and (un)publishing forum topics. (The same callbacks could be used for other nodes, but I expect the callbacks are needed only in forum contexts.) If the template were edited to support these callbacks, forum pages would have links somewhere on the page to lock and/or unpublish a whole topic.

I'm torn between two options:

Maintain a separate module and instruct users how to install the complete package
Support the integration of forum_admin_links with flatforum so users don't have to install much

What are your thoughts? Would you like to integrate the two?

Comments

Comment #1

Michelle

she/her

English

Wisconsin, USA

CreditAttribution: Michelle commented 10 May 2006 at 17:49

I personally, don't have a need for such a module but I think it's a great improvement for those who need a more fully featured forum. IMO, all the forum enhancements would be better kept together in one module, or at least one module tarball. This makes it easier for someone looking for a better forum to get one thing and have a bunch more options.

See the Gallery module for an example of various things come together in this way.

Michelle

Comment #2

Ayman CreditAttribution: Ayman commented 11 May 2006 at 18:00

Thanks for taking the initiative :)

In addition to your module, we have other modules that: 1) enhance Drupal's forum, and 2) can be integrated into Flatforum (Ranks by Post Count and User Badges come to mind).

I lean towards MichelleC's suggestion of following ecommerce on this, I suggest we collect all the modules under one folder, users can choose what to enable, and Flatforum can check what's enabled (using module_exist) and create its output according to it. This way we can combine our efforts to create the ultimate Drupal forum package.

What do you guys think? Do you have other exisiting or suggested modules to add to the list?

Comment #3

njivy CreditAttribution: njivy commented 11 May 2006 at 18:43

Title:	One-click administrative actions	» Forum modules to bundle
Category:	feature	» task

I'm in favor of bundling the forum-related modules.

Perhaps the flatforum module could include private message links using the per-user contact forms.

We might suggest the following modules with some recommended use cases:

taxonomy_access for creating per-forum moderators
privatemsg for server-based private messaging
bbcode for compatibility with the authoring syntax on other popular forums
quote for quoting material in responses

User_maintenance, troll, spam, and captcha may also be useful.

I have not tested most of these modules, but they seem to be directly relevant to a forum-type operation.

Comment #4

merlinofchaos CreditAttribution: merlinofchaos commented 13 May 2006 at 20:56

I'd welcome and encourage you to take the forum_access module from the na_arbitrator package and include it in this. It's in na_arbitrator only as a demo, and would be much more useful in a more easily found location.

Comment #5

beginner CreditAttribution: beginner commented 23 May 2006 at 02:03

Please, don't bundle too much together. Those modules are also useful in sites that don't have any forum. A blog site can use privatemsg.module and would want to install it separatetly without having to install a forum module at the same time.

By bundling everything together, we loose some flexibility which is one strength of Drupal.

Having said that, you may still have a case for bundling two or three closely related modules. Just don't think that the more you bundle together, the better it is...