Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/20295 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: forum.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: pyromanfo Updated by: adrian Status: patch One of the things i realized during DrupalCon , is that we can generalize a lot of functionality into providing different 'views' of nodes. ie : an event calendar, is a listing of nodes that have atleast a start date. a blog page, is a listing of nodes that have the blog bit set (or are assigned to a specific blog, for true multi-author blogs). a forum is a listing of nodes that are assigned to a forum term (of course this is the most complex of the examples). I don't know if this helps any, but perhaps we need to look at providing a node listing API that can handle different sources, and displays. adrian Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2005 - 07:07 : pyromanfo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/flexiforum.patch (10.01 KB) When I saw what was planned for the 4.6.0 forum improvements I was intrigued and a little disappointed. On the one hand, it really did make things easier. On the other hand, it was moving the forum module further away from what I wanted to use it for, making it a little less useful for me. The main thing I wanted the forums for Drupal to do was allow me to use any node type in the forums, following the generic node-based design of Drupal itself. This actually pushed it further away from that goal, having a specific walled-off section of the site that only forum posts are allowed in, and now it's seperate from the other categories as well. So I got to looking at the forum.module code and realized how easy it would be to modify it to use any node type. That, combined with my Quickpost project would allow me the node-generic forum posting I wanted for my site. Enough rambling, here's the goods. Patch Description This patch takes the CVS forum.module and allows users to see any node types in the forums, such as stories, images, book pages, blog entries and flexinode types. It's a suprisingly simple little patch, and if you're like me wanted the forums to be a little more flexible, this patch helps in that regard. It's fairly simple, and I only did preliminary testing so let me know what you think. I don't think this'll get accepted into core, but I didn't know where else to put it. It's too simple to be it's own module and I don't know where else I'd put a patch. If this should be in the forums or something, I'll put it there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2005 - 13:20 : moshe weitzman a pat ch which givces this functionality has a pretty good chance at landing in core. an analogous patch for blog has been submitted and well received .... i haven't looked at this one in particular. the UI issues here are just as important as the geek issues (i.e. any node can be part of the forum) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2005 - 19:11 : pyromanfo One UI issue I know of with this patch is I hardcoded the "Post a new topic" link to link to Quickpost, since that's the only easy way I knew of to do node-type independent content creation when specifying a term id. As a part of the content creation overhaul they're doing if they allow people to specify a term id for any node type then it could link it to that instead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 16, 2005 - 10:17 : Axel Similar work was started in 2004 as 'akvaforum' - separate module, where forum structure may include many terms and many vocabularies. Also any nodetypes may be forum topics. Module works faster than standard forum module with less queries to db. Now it some uncomplete (navigation links and breadcrumbs missed) and works for 4.5. Anyone interested for such forum for 4.6? Contribs CVS: modules/akvaforum http://www.drupal.ru/node/447 - some screenshots ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 16, 2005 - 10:18 : Axel Similar work was started in 2004 as 'akvaforum' - separate module, where forum structure may include many terms and many vocabularies. Also any nodetypes may be forum topics. Module works faster than standard forum module with less queries to db. Now it some uncomplete (navigation links and breadcrumbs missed) and works for 4.5. Anyone interested for such forum for 4.6? Contribs CVS: modules/akvaforum http://www.drupal.ru/node/447 - some screenshots ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 16, 2005 - 13:47 : Dries Looks interesting. 1. We should look into the UI issues. The UI affects all users, the code just affects developers. For each developer, there are at least a thousand users so let's make sure it is 100% intuitive. 2. I don't like the fact non-forum nodes are still treated as a special case -- the forum_nodeapi() has special treatment for non-forum nodes. Can't we tidy up that some more? 3. Use proper PHPDoc comments to document forum_nodeapi(). 4. Empty functions can be removed. 5. Did you measure how this affects the performance of (large) forums?