These are the settings I recommend for use with Advanced Forum. All of these settings are part of core Drupal, and not the Advanced Forum module itself, but Advanced Forum builds on top of core so having a good base is important.

  1. If you haven't already, go to ?q=admin/content/forum and add containers and forums as needed.
  2. Forum settings ( ?q=admin/content/forum/settings )
    • Hot topic threshold: Up to you.
    • Topics per page: Up to you.
    • Default order: "Date - newest first" so the most recent posts are at the top of the topic list.
  3. Select content types to use in forums ( ?q=admin/content/taxonomy )
    • Edit the forum vocabulary
    • Check all content types you want to use in forums.
  4. Comment settings ( ?q=admin/content/node-type/forum ) [Note: do this for each content type used in forums]
    • Expand "Comment settings" fieldset.
    • Default comment setting: "Read/write"
    • Set Default display mode: Flat list - expanded. (Advforum is intended to be used flat. Using it threaded should mostly work but is unsupported and may have some issues.)
    • Default display order: Date - oldest first (newest first will break jump links)
    • Default comments per page: Up to you. (If you chose to have a threaded forum, setting this number to the maximum will reduce issues with pagination and threading.)
    • Comment controls: "Do not display" is recommended.
    • Anonymous commenting: Up to you.
    • Comment subject field: Up to you. If disabled, advforum will not display the Drupal default subject, which is the first few words of the comment.
    • Preview comment: Up to you.
    • Location of comment submission form: Up to you. Displaying below provides a non-ajax quick reply.
  5. User settings ( ?q=admin/user/settings )
    • Signature support: Enabled
    • Picture support: Enable this for avatars in the forum.
    • Picture maximum dimensions: If you change this from the default 85x85, you will want to size it in either CSS or with imagecache to avoid breaking the forum layout.
    • If you use a default image, make sure to use a relative path, not a full URL, if you intend to use the imagecache preset option.
  6. Statistics settings ( ?q=admin/reports/settings ) [Note: the core Statistics module must already have been enabled.]
    • Enable access log: Enabled
    • Count content views: Enabled - Needed for topic views count.

Comments

mottolini’s picture

Given the step-by-step approach followed in this guide, I would like to add, for newbies, that you also have to:

1) enable the menu item Forum (?q=admin/build/menu-customize/navigation) and the blocks New Forum Topics and/or Active Forum Topics (?q=admin/build/block)
2) give authenticated user role the permission to create/edit/delete forum topics (?q=admin/user/permissions)

If you don't set up Drupal this way, your users are not be able to access any forum (because theydon't have any link to it) and create content in it (because they don't have permissions to do so).

Please, note that this is a general advice that could not be suitable to your desired site configuration. As an example, maybe you don't want a menu item to link to forums and you plan to build separate pages or views to do so. At the same time permissions should be finely tuned to not have undesired results, like users cancelling posts...

wreckage’s picture

Hello.
I'm hoping there will be an update of this article for Drupal 7.*, as it would be very helpful to newbies.
Is there any chance of this happening?
Regards,