Advanced Forum
Important support note: The holidays are over but I'm still too swamped to pay much attention to the queue. I'll try to work in some time to tend to it but bug reports will get first priority. It may be some time before I'm able to answer non-trivial support requests.
Originally created for my Coulee Region forums, Advanced Forum is a theme/glue module that enhances Drupal's core forum module. The included styles provide the look typically found in stand alone forum software and the code provides some of the functionality, mostly related to the end user experience. By adding other Drupal contributed modules, many of which are automatically used by Advanced Forum, you can achieve much of what stand alone software provides. Because it uses the core forum module, it uses the node and comment system built into Drupal and is completely integrated, not a bridge.
Make sure you read the documentation! Especially for 5.x, there is more to installing this module than copying it to your server and enabling it.
Features (for 1.x)
- Comes with fully customizable styles to make your forum look like more traditional forums.
- Integrates the display of many forum related contrib modules.
- Adds ability to mark all topics or topics in a forum as read.
- Adds views column to topic list
- Adds extra information and shortcuts such as pagers on topics, link to last post in the forum, jumps within topics, and more.
- A complete list of features can be found in the handbook.
Dependencies (for 1.x)
- Requires: Forum, Taxonomy, Comments, Author Pane 1.x, PHPTemplate based theme
- Recommended: Statistics (for views counter) and Flatcomments (to avoid issues due to the underlying threads when forums are visually set flat.)
- Others: For a complete forum package, see this list of other contrib modules.
Versions
- D5 1.x is no longer supported. Unless a security issue is found, I'm not touching it. If you use it, I suggest the dev as it fixes a couple of small bugs that didn't make it into the official release.
- D6 1.x is complete but I will still fix large bugs in the dev snapshot and may do more releases if there are enough changes or a security issue. I will continue to support this version until the 2.x version has a full release and possibly longer, depending on usage stats.
- D6 2.x is under active development. Alpha 2 works pretty well if you are using Views and Nodecomment but there are known critical bugs if you aren't. I am using it on Coulee Region Online with that combination so it's well tested. However, it is barely documented and not translated. If you choose to use it in production, make sure you test it thoroughly on a dev site first. Because it is alpha, be prepared for potentially large changes before 2.0.
- D7 I will start porting the 2.x branch to D7 sometime after CTools, Panels, and Views are ported. Any features that don't make it into 2.0 will be done in D7.
More styles
Advanced Forum More Styles is a project to hold contributed styles. Only one at the moment but hopefully that will grow. If you have a style you would like to share, file an issue there.
Share your site
If you are using this module on a publicly visible site, I'd love to hear from you. It's always fun to see your module used in the wild.
