[consulting] to fix a major limitation of Drupal design

[Mariano Barcia]

George, all,

A month ago, this very same problem arised doing consulting for a customer,
and we solved it (not without effort) by using nodecomment module, which was
still beta but usable.

I had this in background, now I see this is a topic of general interest, I
can express myself freely :-)

In my opinion, if we are talking about a community, and about "user is the
content", then feedback is key from many points of view.

To divide between a post and the comments to that post is to establish a
barrier between the author and the readers/commenters, which is more like a
Web 1.0 approach, and can be seen in many good CMS systems. It just doesn't
help feedback, and doesn't help build/promote sensation of community. It is
just too structured, and if I make a comment, it just doesn't have the
status of a post (when many many times, comments are much more interesting
than the post itself).

I believe there are many Drupal installations out there that are OK with a
1.0 approach but I don't think that makes Drupal powerful (or what Drupal
does best, not to mention all those Drupal Web 0.2 installations ;-) ).

So, I'm not talking here whether comments can have tags or not, or how they
get displayed in the tracker page. I'm saying that Drupal shouldn't
distinguish between a comment and a post. A comment just has a "motivator"
online (a post), and a post is spontaneous. But.. actually, a post did have
a motivator, just that it was from the outside.

For now, nodecomment helps a lot, although IMO it should provide a wrapper
to let other modules (like comment_notify) do their work seamlessly (like
category does with taxonomy).

Just my 2 cents, HTH, cheers.

--mariano


On 8/26/07, George Por <George at community-intelligence.com> wrote:
>
>  This is message is to those brave souls who think that something can be
> done to fix a major limitation of Drupal design.
>
> I am talking about the fact that only nodes can have categories and tags
> but not comments. That means that a forum topic opener and blog can have
> them individual blog entries and topic replies not, makes those key modules
> largely useless from the perspective of growing the a group's capacity for
> collaborative meaning making.
>
> I talked with many programmers and they all said that adding rags to
> comment cannot be done in Drupal because of its architecture. Is it really
> so? No amount of money could buy developer time to fix that? If any of you
> have a serious proposal, we would consider it.
>
> When we used Drupal 4.6. And 4.7, we got that problem partially resolved
> by using flexinode to mimick a blog, and then we could add tags to the
> entries. However, we moved to 5.1 and, to my knowledge, flexinode doesn't
> work there. Can that be changed?
>
> Another workaround would be to use Moveable Type or another dedicated blog
> software and link the MT blogs fom our Drupal-based home page. However, in
> that case we would loose the handiness of one search command working on all
> content types at once. Any work around that?
>
> Best regards,
>
> george
>
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>
>
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