Drupal Forums - Drupal Basics

Posted Sun, 2009-01-25 21:41 by matthew

I've been playing with Drupal forums quite a bit lately for TraumaAdoption.org, a site for parents of Children of Trauma.  The discussion forums are a focal point for the site for parents.

Drupal's core module "Forum" is basic.  It uses the node and comment system to allow for conversations but not much more.  The look and feel isn't like other forums like vBulletin or phpBB and users may have some difficulty getting used to the interface, particularly if  your participants have used other forum systems in the past.  There are, however, a plethora of contributed modules that can help improve the user experience. 

These include (available in Drupal 6):

  • Advanced Forum - It alters the look and feel of your forum to act in a way much more like stand-alone packages like vBulletin or phpBB. 
  • Forum Thread - This gives your users a nested view of topics in a single view.
  • Signatures for Forums - Gives your users the ability to add a signature to all posts that they make. 
  • Nodeforum - This allows you to take advantage of having forum responses act as nodes in and of themselves.  Nodeforum is dependant on Node comments.
  • Forum Access - Allows you to set up private forums and also give admin access to users in individual forums, essentially allowing you to set up moderators on your site.

For me, there are two things that make Drupal forums extremely appealing.

  1. They are very easy to setup and integrate seamlessly with the rest of your Drupal site-no need for single signon.
  2. They are indexed with the rest of your site for the purpose of search.

One thing that I don't like about Drupal forums is the treatment of responses to a topic. The module uses comments so they won't end up in your xml-sitemap (if you are using the module) as new content.  I expect that this could be rectified if comments are nodes, but that increases overhead.  In addition, I've not had a whole lot of luck setting up Nodeforum--the forum specific module for this purpose--in Drupal 6.

All things considered equal, utilizing some contributed modules, Drupal forums are pretty appealing.

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Comments

by Glueless wigs (not verified) - 2012-04-22 08:31

Thanks for the modules teams, those modules is very useful, i use the Forum Thread on my site, which is really powerful. I like it very much :),

by Anonymous - 2009-12-15 04:38

It is very much user friendly, i have used the Advanced forum and it can be easily configured

README.TXT file is also made in a manner than even those who are new to drupal can also use it

by Anonymous - 2009-01-25 22:33

I would really like to use the Drupal forum in my site, but my users are very used to the phpBB forums from my old, non-Drupal site.

If the comment_upload module was production ready for D6, I might migrate all the data over and use the advanced_forum module, plus other recommended ones. I need comment_upload since users are posting images in replies to demonstrate work-in-progress.

Eric

by Anonymous - 2009-01-26 01:00

Give Advanced Forum a try... with it you can really closely emulate how phpBB looks and functions. I'm looking at the phpBB example forum, and really it wouldn't be too hard to make nearly exactly that with Advanced Forum (a few HTML tweaks to the templates, some CSS, icons, background images, etc). I don't have time now (and may not for quite a while), but maybe I'll make a phpBB clone theme for Advanced Forum (there's one AF phpBB theme out there, but it's not good). Since phpBB is open source GPL I can reuse parts of the real HTML/CSS, icons, etc from phpBB, and just plug Advanced Forum's variables into it... or since I won't have time for a while, you can :)

I've been trying the dev version comment_upload on my D6 test site and have had no issues with it. I plan to use it on an upcoming major site release in any case. The to do list includes: Views 2 integration, Test the upgrade path, and Test the module dev release (and I see a few bugs listed for the D5 version only)... none of which are show-stoppers for me. If there "are" some important bugs though, I for one would be happy to put some $ in the pot to pay Heine (or another developer) to prioritize fixing it up and getting it released. Let me know if you're interested too.

by Anonymous - 2010-01-25 05:01

Nice Comment

by matthew - 2009-01-26 07:20

I use Advanced Forums and like it a lot. Just out of the box, it makes a big difference in the display and user experience.

by Anonymous - 2009-01-26 00:06

If you want to get comment_upload production ready, test it and provide feedback.

by matthew - 2009-01-25 22:43

If you have comments as nodes, you get all the node-ish goodness like file attachments available on each comment.

by Anonymous - 2009-01-26 03:35

This might not be a valid argument any more, at least not for read heavy sites: http://ca.tchpole.net/node/8

by Anonymous - 2010-02-28 15:13

i liked it