Working with forums in Drupal 7 & 6 -- Combining & Reworking

great, will have a look shortly. thanks!

Spoke with Arianek about this in IRC. She mentioned that perhaps we really don't need two separate sets of doc pages for forums in 6 and 7. The only thing that changed is how to navigate to the different areas since the admin structure has changed somewhat.

What I'd like to propose is for the structure to be something like this:

1. Page: Forum: Create Threaded Discussion
   1. Topic: introduction and overview
   2. topic: key terms/concepts
      • containers
      • topics
      • comments
   3. topic: Discussion
      • paragraph: contributed modules to extend functionality
      • paragraphs: ? - other issues that should be considered when using forums
   4. Child Pages:
      1. Child Page/topic: Setting up a Forum for Your Drupal 6/7 Site
         1. Step or Topic: enabling the module
         2. Step or Topic: Configuring roles and permissions (which was a good idea smiro2000)
         3. Step or Topic: Creating containers & Forums
         4. Step or Topic: Managing your Forums (not entirely sure what would go here, but it seems like a good idea)

   Each step would include the path for both 6 and 7. So what we are suggesting is a single child page with clear headings to increase scanability, and make two pages for us to maintain rather than 8.

   Arianek also suggested using "Working With Fields UI" as a possible template. One idea that comes out of this is a "planning forums" section, that I'm not sure how I would write myself, but might go really good in the parent page.

   @smiro2000: I believe a discussion of permissions is a good addition. I also think it benefit from an explanation geared to somebody who is new to social web software on how permissions relates to forums. Perhaps this permission section could introduce the idea of the "moderator" role, and explain the value of this in the design of the site. Just a few sentences to explain the relationship between forums/roles/permissions as an introduction. This is something I'd probably add if you left it as it is, but a discussion of forums/permissions it is a good idea that we ought to develop a bit more.

Hey - I'm gonna wait on that image until it's *mostly* done so the page isn't locked down for others to work on...

Just looking at this again - we definitely need to combine these back into a single section since they're so similar (with D7 as the prominent description and notes for anything that's different in D6). It's far less difficult to maintain then, and if/when we ever actually build a system to manage the versions (like on api.drupal.org) the fewer split up pages, the better it will be to update.

Fields UI page is something I've been pointing people at, but it's more of a mental note to try and make the pages more consistent (not really realistic to do them all right now). Also, don't feel the need to break it up into too many subpages, as long are it's broken up with headings and formatted nicely, it's not too big of a deal.

*Definitely* we should list and describe the permissions.

I'll keep an eye here if you manage to work on it some more and need reviews...

hey smiro2000 - any progress from sprint day? ;)

Updated Working with forums in Drupal 7 page.