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Introducing Advanced Forum

Sun, 12/23/2007 - 22:31 -- Michelle

A little over a month ago, I decided to improve the look of the forums on this site. I had customized flatforum for my Coulee Region community forums and figured I'd just copy it over here and tweak it a bit. Well, I'd forgotten what a mess I had to integrate flatforum into my site and get it looking decent. I figured if I was going to try and rip that all out I might as well straighten it up while I was at it. So, rather out of the blue, I suddenly found myself creating a forum enhancement module.

The idea is pretty simple: the core Drupal forum module in conjunction with various contrib modules and some theming makes a decent forum. But putting that all together is time consuming and difficult for people new to Drupal. So I'm taking the work I've done, making it more generic, and bundling it together in a "glue" module. In addition, I'm pulling together various code snippits that add bits of functionality that are found all over drupal.org and related websites and adding them in here. The result will be a module that transforms the core forum module and contribs into a cohesive forum with as little work as possible on the part of the admin.

The Advanced Forum module is still in its early stages but is already usable (IMO) as a flatforum replacement. I do, however, caution you to not use it on a live site unless you have some php/css knowledge and are able to merge in any changes you make with newer versions of the module as it is far from stable. Also, it has not been tested very thoroughly so make sure you test it on a copy of your live site first. I realize this is fairly standard advice for all modules but I wanted to emphasize it since this is such early code. I wouldn't recommend using it at all if it wasn't for the fact that so many people are chomping at the bit to pretty up their forums. :)

If you maintain a theme on drupal.org, please consider making your theme "advforum-ready". All you need to do is copy the advforum folder out of the module and into your theme and tweak it to match your theme. Add in the function call to template.php and then all a user of your theme needs to do is install Advanced Forum and they will have a forum themed to match their theme automatically. To see an example of this, check out Jacine's Sky theme. I used that theme only slightly modified for this site and you can see Advanced Forum in use here.

More information:

Categories: 
Drupal
Planet

Comments

I was looking at the test site and noticed that you can only reply to the topic, not to an individual reply. Is that the intended behavior? Is is configurable?

Submitted by Michelle on

Every comment has a reply link on it but the flatcomment module forces it to be attached to the main post. This is intentional otherwise it gets confusing having the post be threaded behind the scenes and presented flat. If you don't want that, just don't use the flatcomment module.

Michelle

Submitted by nortix@drupal.org on

I just post my template.php here just to make the install desription a bit easier. It was taken from a clean Drupal5.5 installation with nothing more than advanced-forum installed and the Theme is Garland.

Michelle you did a great job. THX.


function _phptemplate_variables($hook, $vars) {
if (module_exists('advanced_forum')) {
$vars = advanced_forum_addvars($hook, $vars);
}

if ($hook == 'page') {

if ($secondary = menu_secondary_local_tasks()) {
$output = '';
$output .= "

    \n". $secondary ."

\n";
$vars['tabs2'] = $output;
}

// Hook into color.module
if (module_exists('color')) {
_color_page_alter($vars);
}
return $vars;
}
return $vars;
}

I haven't tested it yet, but it must work this way. ;-)

Submitted by Michelle on

Garland is such a pain in the butt to modify. That's why I included the template.php for it with the module. I guess you missed that, but you got it right anyway. :)

Michelle

Submitted by Jacine on

I just wanted to say thank you for all the hard work you put into bringing this module to the community. It was a pleasure working with you on it for my small part. You did an awesome job on it. :)

Submitted by Michelle on

Thanks, Jacine. I've spent all my computer time today fighting with advforum/advprofile issues despite the fact that I was supposed to be taking a break to work on client stuff so a nice post like this really makes my day.

I also need to apologize to the previous poster. Turns out the garland template.php never made it to CVS. Doh!

Michelle

Submitted by SujayG on

Hi ,
I need to have a right hand side bar in the basic sky theme,
Could someone give any pointers clues for the same.
Thanks,
-Sujay

Submitted by Michelle on

Please use the sky issue queue. I'm not the sky theme maintainer.

Michelle

Submitted by mp3 song on

Thanks for the information! I have a question, I met a lot of forums at which the banners Google Adsense between posts topic! how to do the same in their own forum?

Submitted by Michelle on

You can try adding it to the bottom of the top post.

Michelle

Hi, this is quite good.

Just curious, is there a "forum-bot" in this software? Say if I wanna auto post stuff based on an RSS feed or something, is that easily doable?

Thanks!

Submitted by Warhammer on

drupal is indeed very advanced but I think it may lack a bit compared to of invision boards of vbulletin.

Submitted by Michelle on

Sure, they've had several years head start. Plus vBulletin, at least, is commercial software. But considering AF (not counting the contrib modules that help it out) is mostly me working on it in my very limited spare time, I think it's done a pretty good job of adding most of what the average user needs in a forum.

Not really sure what the point of this is... If you're trying to troll, you missed the mark. I never claimed it was as good as commercial software.

Michelle

Submitted by cameron on

Hi Michelle,
Just wanted to drop a line and thank you for the wonderful work you have done here. You helped me out a lot back in drupal 5 before advanced forum was around, on irc, with getting a decent forum up, and now with this module its even easier...keep up the good work and I have made a small donation for you.

Thanks,
Cameron

Submitted by Michelle on

Thanks for the donation. Glad the module helped you.

Michelle