Advanced Forum

Starting with the 2.x branch, Advanced Forum supports the Nodecomment module (branch 2.x of that as well). Using Nodecomment is and will remain optional but using it makes available many more options by making all forum posts, whether they start the topic or reply to it, equal.

Nodecomments are fieldable, comments are not.

This is, of course, only a D6 limitation since comments are fieldable in Drupal 7. But Drupal 6 will be in use for some time so this advantage shouldn't be dismissed. A big use for this is for image handling. Add an image field to your forum topic node type and then add it to your forum reply node type. Consistent interface for your users right out of the box.

Search in forums and within topics.

With Nodecomment, you get two Views based searches. One of them will search all the forums or an individual forum and the other will search within a single forum topic. And the search results will show individual posts, not just the starting topic. That's great when a topic wanders off topic and the node that answers your query is buried in post 242 of a 50 page topic.

List a user's posts.

The "My Posts" view list a user's posts not just nodes that they started or participated in. You can't do that with core comments because you can't mix comments and nodes in the same view.

Topic review.

When a user clicks "reply" they are taken to a new page and their only reference to the topic is the individual post they are responding to. Nodecomment adds a topic review option to be able to see the entire topic while replying.

Forum moderation

This isn't written, yet, but the upcoming forum moderation module will require Nodecomment. This will allow you to split off part of a topic and start a new topic with it or merge it into an existing one. It will also let you delete all of a spammer's posts, whether topic starters or replies in one go. These and possibly other moderation tools will rely on all forum posts being equal.

The cons

Unfortunately, there are downsides to this power.

• To keep the topics loading fast, Views caching is used. This means anything that alters the nodes on a per user basis will have troubles. A work around for Author Pane is built right into Advanced Forum. Another module with issues, Ignore User will hopefully have a work-around eventually but is currently unusable. I haven't found any others but there very well could be so this is something to watch out for.
• Many other modules expect replies to be comments. This means you will often find a module that sounds very useful only to find it doesn't work with Nodecomment. The Notifications module is a big one that just doesn't work with Nodecomment.
• Nodecomment is still in beta. The 2.x branch, which is what you'll want to use, was re-written by merlinofchaos for Sony but he has since moved on. The module isn't abandoned but development has slowed down.

In the end, I think Nodecomment is the way to go for forums, despite the cons and despite the coming fieldable comments. For other parts of your site, such as blogs, the comment module may make more sense and you can continue to use core comments on other node types. But, for forums, treating all posts in a topic equal makes the most sense.

I've always loved the default MyBB theme. Personally, I think it looks much better than PHPBB's default theme. Since MyBB is GPL, I've often thought about porting it over for use with Advanced Forum 2.x. Last night, I spent a couple hours and got pretty far. It still has some rough edges but it's not bad. I can't really spend any more time on it right now so I decided to put what I have up here in my blog both to show what I have so far and share it in case someone wants to finish it off.

If anyone polishes this up and uses this on their site, I'd be interested in seeing it. I got it probably 80% there and but all know the last 20% can be a killer. ;)

In the attachments below are screenshots as well as a zip of the style.

Enjoy!

Early this morning, just past midnight my time, I put out 1.0 releases of Advanced Forum, Advanced Profile Kit, and Author Pane in both D5 and D6 with the exception of APK D6 which still needs a lot of work. I was trying for a 4/1 release just for fun but they're showing up as 3/31 for me (though one person reported it says 4/1 for them). If you've been using the RCs, there's not much change. I've waited until the bug reports stopped on the RCs before doing the release and I haven't made major changes for a while. If you're one of those folks the usage stats reports on the early alphas, I'm afraid it's going to be a rough upgrade.

These releases were a long time coming. Advanced Forum started out as a modified Flatforum on Coulee Region Online two years ago and has been a module of its own since November of 2007. Advanced Profile Kit started out as a tutorial based on the profiles on Coulee Region Online and has been a module since January of 2008. Author Pane is the new kid on the block but is actually bits of AF & APK pulled out so they could be shared. I've been working on these fairly constantly all that time, slowly adding features and working out the bugs. There is still much work to do on Advanced Forum but it has gathered so many users I felt it was time to make a cutoff point so they would have a solid release.

Which brings us to the future. The D5 line is done as I am leaving D5 behind on all my sites and don't care to work with it anymore. I will continue to support it and provide bug fixes until D7 is released but it's definitely on maintenance only mode for me. D6, however, still has much work to do. Advanced Forum will be getting a 2.x branch soon to file feature requests against and I will start in on them in a month or two (I need a short break). For Advanced Profile Kit, I plan on making the move to Panels 3 and finishing up a more limited feature set to give it a 1.0 release. Then that, too, will get a 2.x branch to start in on some of the plans I have to make it live up to the "advanced" in its name.

So this isn't an end to the long journey but merely a milestone. I'm excited to continue taking Drupal's forums and profiles to the next level and hope you all will keep on the journey with me to make these modules the best they can be.

Thank you all for your continued support. Without users, these modules would not be where they are today.

Michelle

[Note: The project that was supposed to fund some of this collapsed which means everything is going to take longer. I'm still working on the modules and will get to 1.0 soon as I'm able but I'm doing this for free so it's not top priority anymore. I'm hoping to have 1.0 of everything except possibly APK for D6 out in February. APK D6 depends on exactly how much I decide to put in the 1.0.]

This post is for people who use or are thinking of using Advanced Forum and/or Advanced Profile Kit. It contains important information to navigate the version mess I have going on right now.

The current supported versions are AF Alpha 16 (D5 & D6) and APK beta 1 (D5). If you are using these modules on a live site, stick with those versions until we get past this reshuffling. I will be doing "unstable" releases while I get them into shape. You'll know it's safe to upgrade when I go back to named alpha/beta releases. Hopefully this won't take more than a couple more weeks but it's hard to predict with my sporadic time to work on this. I am getting sponsored to work on the D6 version of APK for the bits the client's site needs but there's also bits that won't be going into APK that pull my focus away from it. I haven't abandoned the D5 versions but they aren't getting as much attention as my focus is on D6 and so are lagging behind.

If you are looking to help test the new versions, the rest of this will tell you what you need to know. If you aren't comfortable running devel and giving me reproducable steps, this isn't for you. These instructions are for both D6 and D5 but D6 is farther along at this point and will work better as D5 still needs some things backported to it. Once I've done that, I'll release "unstables" for D5 as well to make testing easier.

There are a lot of modules that make up a forum in Drupal. Advanced Forum attempts to make it easier for users by allowing many of those modules to have their stuff show up in the author section of the forum posts. It does this by making use of the preprocess system built into core of Drupal 6 (and backported into Drupal 5). For those not familiar with the preprocess system, it's a wonderful thing. For any template file on your site, any module out there can add variables to it just by implementing the preprocess hook. In this case, I'm dealing with the "author pane" template which is used by both Advanced Forum and Advanced Profile Kit. So all those modules out there only need to implement one preprocess hook and, viola, both modules get their goods.

In theory, it's an excellent way for one module to add their stuff to another. In practice, it failed miserably. Two months ago, I filed issues in seven queues (and an eighth added a bit later) giving them the hook code in a file they only needed to drop into their directory and commit. I did everything but push the button for them. All they needed to do was add this hook and their users could get their stuff into the their forum posts and profiles with no effort. I expected the maintainers would be happy I made it so easy for them.

Instead, I was mostly ignored. Two of the modules weren't interested because they're an API, though one of them finally consented that the module implementing the hook should be the one holding the code, API or not. The other offered to put it in one of their sub modules, which I was fine with, but then they never followed through. I realize everyone is busy and wasn't expecting instant results but it's been two months of users being confused, trying to understand how to get the data from these other modules to show up in their forums. Two months of me telling them they need to add the file manually because the maintainers haven't done it yet.

Finally, I had enough. Because this needs to work with both Advanced Forum and Advanced Profile Kit, pulling the hooks back into AF wasn't an option. This would make APK dependent on AF, which was unacceptable. Trying to put them in both modules would result in namespace collisions and, even if I if tested around that, tons of duplicated code. So, grudgingly, I decided the only way out of this was to create a third module.

Enter Author Pane. This module exists just to be a dependency of AF & APK and hold the code the other maintainers wouldn't touch. It seems silly to create a module to implement hooks on behalf of other modules but it was the best I could come up with. As of the next releases I do, both AF and APK will depend on this module. It seems strange to be sad about releasing a new module, but it's a sad situation. I'm very disappointed that it came to this. So many people give lip service to wanting better forums and better profiles with Drupal and, when I try to make it easier, I'm met with silence and outright resistance. What ever happened to cooperation?