Forum vocabulary can't set required for other content type

Hi,

The line of code which is causing this is in forum_form_alter() :

$form['settings']['required'] = array('#type' => 'value', '#value' => FALSE);

The explicitly hardcoding the FALSE is what's causing this. Since I'm not that familiar with the inner workings of the Forum module, I can't say exactly why this is. I would suspect that since the requirement for choosing a term from this vocabulary when adding/editing a forum post is set manually, it is to let you use the vocabulary for other content types (optionally).

I attached a patch to this post which will display the 'Required' checkbutton under the Settings fieldset. It works but like I said before, there might be some special reason why it's hidden.

#176282: Forum vocabulary is mandatory for node types (and prints notices)

Forcing non-forum-topic nodes to appear in the forum is not currently a supported feature as far as I can tell...

Wait, this would be possible in theory. However, you would be making the forum mandatory for all node types that /could/ be placed into the forum. This would be a confusing change that would require documentation, and I think it's very much a feature request, so it should be bumped to D7.

Patch will not apply to 7.x-dev, so am marking 'needs work'. This is also not high on the priority list, most people expect that a forum topic must have a forum. It's very close to being 'by design' to be honest (maybe someone else will mark it as such). :)

You mean "most people expect that only a forum topic must have a forum"? Because this patch is about forcing non-topic nodes into forums, not having topics outside forums...

I agree with this. I've set up a forum allowing both forum threads and a custom node type, and discovered that not only are the custom node types not required to be in a forum, there's no way to set the vocabulary as required.

It should either be required for all content types appearing in a forum, or have the admin allow it to be required (with required by default). I think the first option would be suitable for consistency with current behavior.

Looks like something broke after #176282: Forum vocabulary is mandatory for node types (and prints notices). As I read it, that patch was supposed to make forum vocabulary optional, but required in the forum module. That patch was applied. However, now we can no longer change the required settings for the forum vocabulary, making setting the non-forum node types forum vocabulary to required impossible (if you can follow that).

That means this is broken in 6 and 7. Setting the version and priority to critical for d6. Hoping to dig up the patch that broke #176282: Forum vocabulary is mandatory for node types (and prints notices).

Looks like this has been fixed already in d7, although I can't find the issue for it. Here's the patch for d6.4.

The original change was made here: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/drupal/modules/forum/forum.module... (via CVS blame). So from making forum vocabulary required in all cases, it changed to making forum not required in all cases and making it required via manual coding when we deal with an actual forum node type.

If we do expose the checkbox, people might assume that making the vocabulary non-required will make it non-required for forums, which is not true. Also, if people do make it required, our existing code to make it required might go fubar, since two different codes try to make it required (that needs to be tested). So this does need some more thought and discussion.

The latest Drupal 7 code still has this same commit intact as far as CVS blame tells me, so this should be fixed there.

It creates a problem only if you want to have ONE and the SAME and ONLY ONE taxonomy required for your content, including forum posts. This is currently impossible. While you can create a new taxonomy to be required for forum and other content, it forces the user to deal with TWO required taxonomies when posting to the forum. Whats more, with the new taxonomy in place, the initial forum taxonomy may become useless. But site owners and users are still required to put some useless words just to satisfy the initial forum taxonomy. The solution seems easy: If the initial forum taxonomy is *required* for all forum posts, why isn't it required for all other content associated with it? That seems a bit arbitrary. I assume it has something to do with the inner workings of the "special" forum taxonomy.

Anybody know of a working D6 patch for this... if I understand the issue here correctly, it's what I'm looking for: the ability to make forum vocab. required for certain node types in addition to "Forum topic" node type. (If "real world" example helps: on our site, we handle all comments in the forums, but we also have some articles and other things we want to discuss only in the forums... currently, it's easy to forgot to assign it to a forum and result is comments that are not where they should be).

Edit: nevermind. Patch in #10 works fine if apply manually... it only comments out one line (line disables the "required" ckbx). So far this seems to work fine.. though I'm sure there's a better non-core-hack way to do it.

It creates a problem only if you want to have ONE and the SAME and ONLY ONE taxonomy required for your content, including forum posts. This is currently impossible.

Well, for example, I need this to convert a couple of sites to Drupal. They have many topics, and each topic has subsections such as a forum, a guide of resources, articles, etc., about that topic. I hope this is possible in some way using the forum vocabulary.

The forum vocabulary is now a field in D7 which means this no longer applies, moving back to D6.

Is there any interest in this issue? Has this been fixed in the latest D6?

If there is no interest or no patch forthcoming, then this issue should remain postponed.