Drupal Basics - Forums

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.

Hi Matthew--

Cool, since you posted this I have a chance to look at the TraumaAdoption site. I was curious, how do the forums integrate with other parts of a site (blog, etc.)? Are you finding spam to be an issue at all or is this managed by a site-wide spam module?

The biggest thing missing for me in the Drupal forums is the lack of ability for users to connect with one another. I wish there were user profiles you could easily click on and view. While conversations and information is exchanged in forums discussions, I find the personal connections, networking and finding common areas of interest & overlap with others to be one of the most valuable parts of forums for me.

Hi Megan,

The integration is absolutely seamless.  Forum posts are treated the same as blog posts.  Blogposts are treated the same as books.  They all end up being indexed by the Drupal instance.  All spam is handled site wide.  In the case of TraumaAdoption 115783 spam messages have been blocked over the last 131 days using Mollom.  Users can connect with one another by simply clicking on the user's avatar and clicking on "contact" if the user has indicated that they want to be connected with provided the permissions have been set up that way.

Drupal Forums, using the right contributed modules, are as powerful as any other forum system and have the added bonus of automatically being included in:

1)  The entire site's SEO sitemap

2)  Automatically included in the site's search index

3)  All posts across every content type are associated with the one user who posted that particular content.

Hope that helps!

Matthew.

Thanks for this -- you listed a few modules I have not experimented with yet. (We don't have a forum on our site, but we help a few groups that do, so it may come in handy).

It is a pleasure.