Integrate PHPBB/Vbulleting etc. into Drupal? Or not?
Huston, we have a problem.
It might be an attitude problem, maybe a communication problem, but certainly a problem.
Nearly weekly we get some question in the Drupal forums about integration of some of these Full featured Bulletin boards.
Longer term Drupal users and developers all know that it is a) not as easy as it sounds and b) not necessary in 90% of thee cases. So this is not about integrating those, because there really s no need for that. I am confident that Drupal can do at least 75% of what phpBB can. Plus so much more witch phpBB cannot. The need is not to integrate this, but to offer an easier way to this functionality that people obviously miss, or cannot get working in Drupal.
But still we have a problem. PHPBB; or vbulletin come with bucketloads of features, ready, installed (and work properly together).
In Drupal you need to know first of all that forum.module is not the only forum thing. But that you have to enhance your forums with other modules. This is not clear. We fail to communicate this, it seems.
Even if people know this. They can still not find it. Who could think that it is taxonomy_access to add per forum permissions? Or og.module to allow people to join certain forums. Who knows that it is commentcloser that will close threads after a while? etc etc. The list goes on.
I think that even a recipe will not help much. It is the “out of the box” (OOTB) experience that people need.
What we really need, I think, is a dedicated forum distro. Some distribution that offers a nice OOTB PHPBB clone. Should we put money together to get this done? I certainly have no time for this, nor to lead such a project. But I know for sure that this “Drupal forums suck” should end. We have the components. Someone needs to collect them and make them play alongside. That is “all” :).
So We might be able to get this project going, if someone has enough reasons (funding) and itch to start it. Maybe someone sees a nice (commercial?) opportunity here? I am confident that such a distro will be very popular, and that it even makes a nice busyness model to provide Drupal forum services.
Lets hope this post brings people ideas :).
Drupal and PHPBB integration
After some work on an existing module, we managed to achieve a tight PHPBB - Drupal integration module, and users at our Java portal are grateful :)
Hope it helps :)
Mariano Iglesias
Working on it
Hello Ber,
Such a distribution (4.6.6 based) is exactly what I’m working on.
Heine
Very interesting.
Have you got a central place yet? Somewhere where we can track progression or so?
I'll post something later
Not yet,
The biggest challenge was to get proper (per forum) moderator roles. That’s easy for nodes with taxonomy_access, but these moderators need ‘administer comments’ permission as well, breaking the per forum moderation.
So I bolted on a comment access by node system. If you have nodeaccess(‘update’, $comment->nid) permission, you can update the comments. Similarly if you have nodeaccess(‘delete’, $comment->nid) you can delete the comments.
Right now, one can set to use this system per node type and whether node authors (they have node_access(‘update’) permission) should be allowed to update comments on their post.
Incidentally this makes comment moderation by blog owners possible.
At the moment I’m rewriting the UI of comment mover (http://drupal.org/node/61812). I’ll hand over my patch to killes, then modify the permissions once again…
PS I’m not so sure about a ‘commercial’ possibility here
@commercial:
It certainly depends on your needs,
But What i was aiming at most, is providing services for people who want support and consultancy with that.
Being able to install a furum distro is one thing, even if that is easy.
Being able to get help and even security with that is another thing.
We should not remember that Drupal is cutting edge. The huge part of the people (maintaining the wallet) out there do not even know about blogs, let alone care about xmlrpc-cleancss-etc.stuff.
they want a forum to Just Work.
That is the huge success of phpBB, because I am sure that phpBB has at least ten times as much users as Drupal. At least. The success is that forums are getting known and that it Just works.
That is why I beleive this could be a commercial success. Even if you back it up with only ads, and no services. I beleive it can still be.
Good luck
You know, if some mysterious person would ever write such a thing, it would be published. It can’t be me either as I don’t run forum sites nor have any interest in doing so. The one person I know who expressed interest is now so busy with Drupal related work that I doubt they will have time to devote to it.
Per the other comment, you will see many posts from me in the forums requesting someone who has a working forum site share the docs with the community. So far no one has. It would go as a child page here: http://drupal.org/handbook/site-recipes if someone ever does decide to share.
-sp
Put out the fire
During my short time involved with Drupal, I have heard that DFS comment several times, and in three languages: English, Russian, and Esperanto. It has been the #1 reason given for not using Drupal, and you guys have not taken it seriously enough until now. When you get a perception problem like this, you need to hit it hard. It’s a fire, put it out. At the very least, how about
-a Forum How-To Handbook at http://drupal.org/handbooks
-examples of best-practice forums
-feature comparison table of Drupal vs. the others.
I would chip in a token amount ($100) to support the overall effort.
Speaking of multiple languages, more multilingual support is what I really want to see ….
DFS, Drupal Forum S***
Please reread my post. I never, ever say that Drupal forum modules SXX. I beleive they are great. as a starter.
Drupal forums are not all there is to forums. And finding a way to:
a) make that fact known and
b) solve that problem by getting All There Is To Forums known for Joe Average.
is my point.
Bèr
What is DFS?
If I may ask?
I guess
Drupal Forum Sucks
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