[drupal-devel] [feature] Flexiforum modifications

[pyromanfo]

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:   pyromanfo
 Status:       patch
 Attachment:   http://drupal.org/files/issues/flexiforum_1.patch (10.46 KB)

"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.

"
This was my main problem with submitting the patch, as I knew I could
just link to Quickpost on my site but I couldn't think of a good way to
do automatically categorized posting independent of node type with the
current "create content" system of Drupal core.


"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.

"
sure, done.


"5. Did you measure how this affects the performance of (large) forums?

"
I haven't done any testing myself but all I did was remove an extra
table to join against on most of the DB queries, and copied the
breadcrumb code to the nodapi "view" hook.  I'd imagine it'd be similar
or better than the current forums, it certainly seems speedy enough on
my test site.




pyromanfo



Previous comments:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 11, 2005 - 05:07 : 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 - 11:20 : 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 - 17:11 : 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 - 08:17 : 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 - 08:18 : 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 - 11:47 : 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?




------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 17, 2005 - 12:03 : adrian

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.