This is just an issue to get some thoughts written down. If it happens at all, it won't be for some time, maybe not until D7. If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to share, but please don't "subscribe". Posts like this are "subscribe" magnets so I'm doing a preemptive strike. :P

Ok, on to the idea...

Forums in Drupal are currently taxonomy terms. This works, but is limited. In D6, taxonomy isn't fieldable. I believe it is in D7 so that may render a lot of this moot.

I've considered making them nodes but I'm not sure that's the best route. They aren't really content and I think that's abusing the node system.

So I'm thinking of making them a non node "entity". Basically a collection of data in a table with a UI. Some things to store:

Image - Would take over from using the taxonomy image module
Extra description - Allows for a different, potentially longer, description on the individual forum page as opposed to the forum listing
Number of topics & posts - Denormalizing this would speed up the query. Not sure how the number of new posts would factor in here
Taxonomy term ID - If we want to relate this back to core forum. Another option would be to use this and break with forum module completely.
Allowed node types - This is an often requested feature that has no easy way of being added right now. This might make more sense as a related table, though, otherwise you have one to many stuffed in a field.
Access control? - Really not sure on this one... I haven't looked at access control enough to know if it would be easier to set it on the forum. Would probably be a seperate table anyway.

There's probably more uses for this that I'll add as I think of them.

Michelle

Comments

Michelle’s picture

Status: Active » Postponed

Not any time soon...

Michelle’s picture

Version: 6.x-2.x-dev » 7.x-2.x-dev
Status: Postponed » Active

Moving this to 7.x. Still don't plan on working on it any time soon but it will more than likely be in 7.x, not 6.x.

Michelle

thomas1977’s picture

Would this make it possible to create and assign different content types to different forum containers/categories? Say, I want to have a forum container named "Discussion on car models" and I want to assign the node type "Car" to this container - and a different forum container named "Discussion on different fruits" and I want to assign the node type "Fruit" to this container. Then the content types can have different form fields like "Carbon emission pr. mile" for the Car content type and "Place of origin" for the fruit content type. This would it super easy for our users to contribute and create content. BTW: we don't have those discussion topics on our site, so they're just examples :-)

Best,
Thomas

Michelle’s picture

Having forums be entities makes it easier to have per forum configuration but specifically allowing per forum content types would still need to be built as a separate feature. I'm fairly sure there's an issue for that already.

Michelle

thomas1977’s picture

Thanks for replying so quickly! Looking forward to having the multiple content types for the (advanced) forum module available. Ready to test out.

Fidelix’s picture

This route is awesome.

Access control is hard to decide, but other modules will probably give this capability (Entity Based Access Control).

Michelle’s picture

Yeah, when I wrote this a year ago I had never heard of D7 entities. I don't even know if they'd been created yet. I was using "entity" in the more general sense of the world. Now that D7 has actual entities, yes, it makes sense to use them and there very well may be another module that handles entity access control. There is still the matter of translating access to the forum entity onto access to nodes related to the forum entity, though.

Michelle

troky’s picture

Status: Active » Postponed

Planned for 7.x-3.x.

troky’s picture

Component: Miscellaneous » Code
Status: Postponed » Closed (won't fix)

Won't happen in AF but in Artesian Forum.

Jackinloadup’s picture

Link to Artesian Forum for people who are linked here.

p.s. Thanks for all the hard work ^_^

kunobobo’s picture

thanks for the hard work tho, really appreciate.

Michelle’s picture

I'll count those as thanks in advance... Haven't done much, yet. Will get there ASAP, though. :)

Michelle