For years I have been using phpBB for a busy community website that has over 162490 registered members. It has been a great ride, members are happy with the functionality and ease of use BUT from a development and security point of view it has been a painful experience.
As anyone who has ever installed, hacked and setup phpBB forum will tell you that due to the lack of hooks or modular nature of phpBB you have to hack core to add any additional functions. Prior to Drupal this was "acceptable loss" to me, but I have "come to my senses" and it is something that I would hate to do now.
For one of the work websites (www.mychild.co.uk) that is currently running on Drupal 5, we decided to expand the website and expand it to incorporate a forum. Fun times!! After much deliberation and discussions about pros and cons of each package, here is a "must have" that we decided upon:
Must have features
- Forums must share the same login as Drupal site
- MUST look and feel like a phpBB/VB forum
- Private Messenging
- Private Forums (moderate only - access by role)
- Email notifications of updates/comments
- Avatars
- Post count (in profile and forum posts)
- Star Ranking (based on post count)
- Rank Badge (based on role)
- Custom folder icons (keeping the look and feel close to phpBB)
- New posts since last visit
- Custom breadcrumb
- Banner blocks
- Ability to cross promote other drupal content types (based on term relationships)
- Attachments in comments (with limit)
- Quote
- Banwords
- Offsite links open in a new window
- Advanced search
It quickly became apparent that we were no longer looking at a standalone Forum package for which I could bridge the login/session with Drupal. Since we wanted to bring majority the Drupal and custom functionality over to the forums Drupal Forums was the way ahead.
So, how do you go about achieving the above with Drupal? Easy. Well, sort of easy. Drupal Forums are very basic out of the can. It is basically a node with comments enabled. Without going into coding specifics at this stage, here is a brief outline on how we added some more meat to the Drupal Forums, I installed the following helper modules to mimic a "proper forum":
Modules used
- Advanced Forum
- Author Pane
- BBCode
- Comment upload
- Extended user status notifications
- Flat comments
- Quote
- Upload max files
- Signatures for forums
- User badges
- User Stats
- Word Filter
- Smileys
- Subscriptions
- jQuery Update
- External Links
- Forum Access
- Abuse
- Apache Solr
- Statistics
- Private messages
The above modules provided around 80% of the missing functionality. The remaining bits and pieces were down to writing my own custom modules and a custom theme for Advanced Forum. If the website had been running Drupal 6, we could have pushed the boat out even further, but that is for another day.
If you have any specific questions or coding queries, please post a comment and I will try to answer.
Now, for some screen shots:
Forum Home Page
Forum Node & User Info
Forum Stats
User Profile
Forum Private Msg
Your thoughts, feedback and comments are most welcomed.
51 comments
5th Jan, 10
A very useful post - I am in a similar situation. My site is using phpBB hooked into Drupal with one of the bridge modules. I would like to move to a Drupal only setup... at some point I need to migrate the old forum into Drupal.
I don't think it will be fun. Any thoughts on migrating the posts?
Also, do you allow attachments to forum posts/comments/
Eric
5th Jan, 10
Hi, migrating posts from phpbb v2 and v3 to Drupal is possible using the importer module that comes bundled in with the phpbb-to-drupal bridge module. However, if you are using Drupal 5, there is no importer from phpbb v3, sadly you will have to write your own (upgrade module?) or upgrade your installation to drupal 6.
Yes we allow comment attachments, I am using the Comment upload module for that. For attachments on the nodes, you can either use cck filefield or the core upload module. I am using cck filefield as it allows me to specify a dedicated folder for forum uploads.
5th Jan, 10
I've been considering making the move from vBulletin to Drupal for a large community site I run. However I'm curious about performance. I have 100k threads, 1.2M posts, 33k users and get around 65k unique hits / day (most from anonymous) users. How has the performance of your Drupal site faired?
5th Jan, 10
As with any big Drupal site, performance is a concern if you are not on a dedicated server. Luckily, for the work sites we have 1 dedicated web server, 1 dedicated file server and 1 dedicated DB server. On top of that we are using OP Cache (Xcache) and mysql caching. Without which I am sure the servers would struggle to cope with the resource hungry beast that Drupal can be.
Although it is not a common practice on forums to cache the pages for anonymous users, we did implement a page cache of 10-15 min. This is to minimise resource drain due to anonymous trafic and also to add an incentive for the users to become a registered member.
So, I guess it will ultimately depend on what resource you have and also if there is a financial benefit to having a seamlessly integrated forum with the drupal website. If there is no "real" benefit or requirement to have seamless integration, it might be better to run a phpBB/VB package on a subdomain. I guess it all depends on what you are trying to do and how valuable you deem the community is to your main website!
For a forum only website that needs to run on a shared host, drupal might not be the ideal solution! It all depends...
5th Jan, 10
Nice writeup! It's too bad you're still on Drupal 5. AF 2.x gets a lot closer to the "expected" forum experience. Looks like you did a real nice job, though. I like your forum style.
Michelle
5th Jan, 10
Thanks Michelle, without Advanced Forum and all other addon modules it wouldnt have been as easy.
In an ideal world we should have upgraded to D6 but we have so many custom modules on the website (banner system, co-reg system, lead collection, payment gateways etc etc) that it would have turned out to be a much bigger project. So sadly we have to make do with D5.
D6 upgrade is on the cards for this quarter of the year, lets see how smooth that goes. We needed to get something off the ground quickly and test the waters to see if it is something that we want to pursue long term, so a big thank you to you and all the team behind all the modules that I had to rely on :)
6th Jan, 10
What are the remaining 20% functionality required to write custom modules ?
6th Jan, 10
its mainly:
- Star Ranking (based on post count)
- Custom folder icons (keeping the look and feel close to phpBB)
- New posts since last visit
- Custom breadcrumb
- Ability to cross promote other drupal content types (based on term relationships)
- Custom theme
- Online members
- Hall of fame
6th Jan, 10
I'd be very interested to learn how the user experience is, both for site users and site staff. I am in a similar situation, although my site is not yet in production, I am developing a site based on both Drupal and phpBB. I have shied away from trying to duplicate phpBB functionality in Drupal because of the sheer number of extra modules that would be required (and the associated evaluation work). Incidentally, I don't see having to "hack" phpBB as that big of a deal; having a good version control system up and running, that allows you to merge in changes from one version of phpBB to the next, is 80% of the headache gone. Of course a hooks system is better and there is a clear trade-off here, but for me, the sweet-spot still seems to be a bridge solution. But again, I would be interested to learn how the user experience is; if there is a pre-made list of Drupal modules that will result in functionality close or equal to a "proper" forum, that's a lot of the work already done.
9th Jan, 10
Weird... This looks threaded but there's no reply links. Anyway, this is to Eelke:
http://drupal.org/node/227121
Michelle
11th Jan, 10
thats odd, you should be able to see "reply", I'll check. Cheers for the link btw.
7th Jan, 10
Hi Janak:
Looks great.
What is the style you used?
Thanks,
Murali.
7th Jan, 10
thank you. This was a custom style I made for to match the website! You can take one of the default Advanced Forum themes and easily customise that I suppose!
9th Jan, 10
Great post, very helpful. Am trying to get a forum running on my site at the moment. Having trouble getting author pane working but it is coming along.
Any reason you are using Drupal 5? I am too but it was initially so I could get the phpBB integration working smoothly (which I ditched anyway to go with this method)
Do you also know if there is a way to create a back button without using breadcrumbs when you are looking at a thread? There seems to be one missing.
PS: How are you doing the nice jQuery comment submission?
11th Jan, 10
Look fwd to seeing you work, please drop a link here when your site is live.
We have a lot of custom modules that are mission critical and it will take a while to upgrade them all! We didnt want to delay the launch of the forum until that upgrade happens.
Sorry, back button to go back to where? The main forum listing page or the forum (taxonomy term) itself? Either are possible and I think they might be implemented in D6 version of advanced forum already! If not, I might be able to help you figure out the code.
jQuery Comments are done using this wonderful AJAX Comments module by neochief
11th Jan, 10
Amazing writeup....did you send your theme to drupal garden or upload back to community?
Great work!
11th Jan, 10
No this one was quite a custom theme for MyChild website and wasnt really developed with drag-drop functionality in mind. You can quite quickly modify one of the Advanced Forum stock theme to mimic what you see here. Besides, D6 branch of Advanced Forum is already much better and I guess the theme is very close to a "proper forum" look and feel!
13th Jan, 10
Nice post. I'm running a large forum site with Simple Machines Forum (SMF), which I'm planning to switch for Drupal. However, first I need to convert to PHPBB, then Drupal. I'd like to know if you had problems with the passwords when converting from PHPBB to Drupal?
Also, most forums have the possibility to jump directly to the "Last post" from the Boards index. In Drupal, this option brings you to the page Index, where you have to manually look for the last post. Could you solve this problem?
Cheers
17th Jan, 10
Hey there,
http://student-in-law.com/forum/ is my Advanced Forum, with most of the theming done (much helped by your site as an example of where to find the relevant lines of CSS that I had trouble locating).
Am having two major troubles though. Post reply button does not work, the comment/post form does not display when it is clicked. Also, the author panel still is not showing up on people's posts. Infuriating! Any ideas off the top of your head what that could be? Is my panel too narrow? I don't quite get it.
24th Feb, 10
Hello Janak,
i just visited mychild - great site! and the first time, that I consider in keeping the drupal forum. One question: How did you manage it, that the link "last post" on a page like http://www.mychild.co.uk/forum/welcome-to-the-forum-1848 contains the "...page=14..."? We use 'speaking urls' but if the number of comments exceeds the number displayed on one page, in our forum the "last post" link doesn't work :(
In other words: how to implement the number(s) of a page (I use the autopath modul).
with Kind Regards,
Steward
4th May, 10
Hello Janak,
A great work and great info provided.
This post makes me happy for my decision to switch to Drupal forum from smf.
Btw, the main site theme looks great. Is it available for download?
4th May, 10
thank you :)
Sadly the theme is not available for download as it the part of the corporate branding of MyChild website
With a bit of patience and some inspiration, it shouldnt be too difficult to make a theme that is mychild "inspired" ;)
5th May, 10
Thanks.
Also, can you please tell me about the theme used for main site on mychild.co.uk?
6th May, 10
it was a bespoke theme I designed for MyChild website. It has not been shared in the Drupal community due to corporate branding implications. Would not look very good if 100s of sites looked exactly like MyChild due to me sharing the theme, besides that would also constitute to "theft" of company property on my part.
Its not a complicated theme, should be fairly easy if someone wants to get "inspired" and knock up something similar.
22nd May, 10
Thanks so much for this, I'm moving an online community over to Drupal from a custom CMS built on top of phpBB, I was starting to freak out about the lack of features in the default forum. This list is an excellent starting point, I'd never even heard of half these modules.
Much appreciated!
25th May, 10
Excellent info, thanks.
And, what is the best way to implement the reply notify, like we see in other forums cms like smf, phpbb, vB..
What do you use?
And, do you do custom dev services? if yes, please drop me an email. else.. :) All the best!
10th Jun, 10
Hi, great write-up. We are looking at possibly converting a phpbb3/wordpress site to drupal + drupal forum and this is great info to consider.
Can you expand on management of the forum? Has MyChild upgraded to Drupal6? Very interested in your retrospective thoughts on this setup.
-Michael
12th Jun, 10
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comment. D6 upgrade is in the pipeline for MyChild and I imagine this would include updating the Advanced Forum module, which in D6 is quite a complete forum addon.
We had some issues with PHPBB3 to Drupal5. From what I recall, there was no bridge module for D5. Also, PHPBB3 is quite a nightmare to port back to previous versions.
Roughly how many users and posts are you looking to migrate over from PHPBB?
20th Oct, 10
Any updates on moving to D6 and what changes you would make to your list of modules at the top? I'm looking to build a forum and have followed this article closely to get everything installed on my test server, but I'm using D6 since it's a new site. Just finished the 2 hour process of downloaded all of those modules, uploading them to the site and enabling everything. That's a lot of modules!!
15th Jan, 11
great post. I like it
23rd Jan, 11
Admiring the time and effort you put into your blog and detailed information you offer! I will bookmark your blog and have my children check up here often. Thumbs up!
29th Jan, 11
Thanks you verymuch. For the article.
8th Feb, 11
First-class info it is surely. My teacher has been seeking for this update.
22nd Feb, 11
wow... awesome information what you have shared with us. I enjoyed to read the informative post. Thanks for sharing. I am happy to visit again.... Good job! Keep posting....
Regards
sharon baker
22nd Feb, 11
Awesome information what you have shared with us. I am really very happy to read this post. Thanks for great efforts what you have put for this article. Thanks a lot.. Good job! Keep posting...
25th Feb, 11
Hey man this is a very informative article. I read that whole thing and have checked out with the modules. Now, I will try to do it for my own site. I have tried the normal Forum module for Drupal and since then I was willing to implement it, off course with a lot of added functionality :)
30th Mar, 11
Really great post :)
We're running a Drupal sites with about 15000 registred members, moved from another CMS last august, and since we couldn't find a solution, we have PhpBB and Drupal working together. This has been a really messy experience though, and there's so many problems with logins, and double profile (Drupal profile and phpBB profile) and so on.
I really wish, we could do, what you have done here.
I miss links to Drupal profile in the posts (from avatars/usernames), possibility to send pm right from the forum (you know, "send pm" button or link) and that the pm system, would work together with the forum.
This has without doubt, been my biggest headache, and is still my biggest regret for the new site.
It's working, but it's not great. It could be great, if the forums was an integrated part of Drupal, instead of being something attached to the site.
Actually, we had installed most of the modules you list in your post, in the process, when we built the site. So, we should have just gone the extra mile. I didn't think it was possible to get most of the phpBB functionality with me, if we decided to go all Drupal.
How great it would be!
Thank you once again, for writing this post.
30th Mar, 11
HI Anita,
Glad to know this post has been useful to you guys, look forward to seeing what you have implemented.
19th Apr, 11
Great write up, I never thought about it like that before. But this really does make sense. I really need to start finding more time to make use! thanks!
22nd May, 11
What he said!
25th May, 11
I think this is really one of the most vital information and facts in my opinion. And I am just pleased looking at your article. But wanna remark on some common things, The web page fashion is wonderful, the articles is truly excellent : D. Excellent job, best wishes
26th May, 11
I prefer vb.net over that Drupal forum engine. VB.net is easy to configure while Drupal is such a hassle.
16th Jun, 11
Keep up the wonderful work!
here are a few words of chaos:
16th Jun, 11
Terrific site, I have not noticed janaksingh.com before in my web searches
twisted brains think alike:
20th Jun, 11
I was very pleased to find this site. I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoyed every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out the new stuff you post.
4th Oct, 11
Hi Janak
Thanks for the interesting post (and to others for the dialog).
It would be interesting to know would your view would be if you were in the equivalent position now - of wanting to implement a forum on a Drupal 7 website. Would you choose phpBB or use the modules that are available or becoming available in Drupal 7?
Alex
4th Oct, 11
I am sure phpBB has come a long way since this post. Personally, I would still use Drupal and build a forum around it for one simple reason - Drupal can do forum and SO much more. phpBB is simply a forum. If the requirement is to simply have a forum phpBB will do. If you need something more, go Drupal
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