By Cross_and_Flame on

I've been considering a conversion from phpbb to drupal. But again and again you hear it: "the Drupal forum is inferior to dedicated forum software like phpbb."

    A short bit about me. I run a medium-sized phpbb forum and have yet to see a really strong drupal forum that has wowed me to converting to drupal. But I want to. I want Drupal to wow me away so I can quit trying to patch and repatch my phpbb install, and instead rely on the more solid drupal core (with easier upgrades). Plus, my own tricked-out phpbb forum won't survive the upgrade to the newest phpbb software on the horizon. So I'm looking at an upgrade anyway.

So, I'm interested in what can be done. I ran a search and saw a few dedicated forums in drupal, but nothing spectacular. So I thought I'd open it up to the drupal community.

Post the most tricked out (most features) drupal-powered forum that you know of.

If you are the admin, what modules did you install or custom code did you write? If you are a member or a user, what upgrades made the forum function better?

I guess I want to know if anyone else has achieved a better forum. Yes, I've looked at the Unreal.ie forum, and while that's a good start, I'm more interested in seeing case studies than a work-in-progress.

Thanks in advance. Seeing may make a drupal believer out of me ;-)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

hectorplus’s picture

hectorplus commented

Have you checked out http://gallery.menalto.com/forum ?

Tecito.com
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michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

This is the best one I've seen: http://www.mobilepokernow.com/forum

Michelle

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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

Cross_and_Flame’s picture

Cross_and_Flame commented

That one is nice! Has an "authentic" forum software feel to it, even though I don't see the advanced forum features of a dedicated product..

srodriguez’s picture

srodriguez commented

This is the most beautiful Drupal Forum I have seen. It's great to see that it can be done.

styro’s picture

styro commented

Generally in Drupal with its general purpose user role, node and taxonomy design features aren't necessarily 'forum' specific features but general ones for all kinds of nodes etc. Drupal module developers usually aren't interested so much in creating specific features for a specific usage, but creating flexible general features than can be combined in all kinds of creative ways.

I think people get a bit stuck on thinking Drupals forum module is lacking while not quite realising they might want to look a bit wider than just high powered forum modules for the features they want. After all a Drupal forum node is not much different from any other node type - they just have a few extra taxonomy based grouping and listing pages.

--
Anton
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Cross_and_Flame’s picture

Cross_and_Flame commented

As you said, drupal has all the tools of a forum engine. I can browse the feature list of phpbb and check off a module for almost everything on the list (except emoticons, I think).

So what I'm looking for is forums that have tried a successful combination of features and created something more coherent than the vanilla forum module.

As you say, I'm looking to see how creative have people gotten with their drupal forums. The tools are in our hands, and by comparing case-studies, perhaps everyone with a drupal forum can find new ways to better it.

Thanks for your comment.

vm’s picture

vm commented

emoticons would be the smilies.module.

jacauc’s picture

jacauc commented

Guess the one on gallery.menalto is ok, but i've also never seen a really neat forum implementation with drupal, similar to phpbb or vbulletin.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Curious... Do you have an example of a phpbb forum that you think is really "tricked out"? They all look pretty much the same to me. Just wondering what sort of forum you're shooting for and maybe I'll get some ideas for my forum. ;)

Michelle

--------------------------------------
My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

vm’s picture

vm commented

Personally, I've never ran phpbb without using the Categories Heirarchy (CH) module. which is more of a phpbb rewrite then it is a module. it can be seen here. http://ptifo.clanmckeen.com/

A discussion about how best to implement into CMS's here http://ptifo.clanmckeen.com/viewtopic.php?t=4414. It would be nice to see some activity in this discussion again from those with the knowledge to bridge the two.

The author of Categories Heirarchy writes very elegant code. The most amazing part about what hes chosen to do is his cacheing method. This can be seen by checking the footer of every page on the site for the amount of querries needed to render the page.

I don't know that "tricked out" can be the definition of the site I've listed. I know though that vanilla phpbb's index page can reach super high querries as more and more mods are added to it, just as drupal does. a CH modified phpbb does not.