Best Drupal 7 and professional forum integration

By scislaghi on 26 Feb 2014 at 06:42 UTC

I'm evaluating drupal for a national professional community site. Forum will be a core part of the site. First, I looked ad phpBB and vBulleting, but soon I discovered that drupal integration is not really simple. Some forum posts suggest the use of advanced forum, however this project seems no more under development accoring to drupal site.

So, I'm confused on the choice. Does anyone has a recent experience or suggestion about the topic?

Thanks

Comments

What kind of integration do

jryi commented 26 February 2014 at 09:47

What kind of integration do you mean? If you are only looking at forum software, you can't really go wrong with vBulletin. It looks like the most professional one out of the ones I have played around with. But as to the last question: yes, I have some recent experience, as I am doing some integration between Drupal and vBulletin myself.

Longer story:

I own one site with phpBB and am a moderator in another that uses vBulletin (both are video gaming related). In the latter we also have a public site with news and reviews and articles, and it used to have a content management solution of our own making. Now, I'm migrating this to Drupal, and one part of the new site is authentication and authorization of users against vBulletin database.

I have written a couple of integration modules, that work with phpBB and vBulletin. I've been toying around with the idea of actually making these modules generally available, but since this is my first shot a Drupal module development and I'm not sure if I'll be interested in continuing the development past my own needs, I might decide to not do it. I don't believe that there is need for more "Not actively developed" modules...

My module is really simple, though. It requires that your Drupal server has access to the vBulletin database. Once the connection is set up, you can:
- determine the vBulletin user groups that are banned (i.e. user belonging to such group is not allowed to log in)
- map vBulletin groups to Drupal roles, so the access rights are derived from group membership
- logging in with vBulletin username/password (creating the new use in Drupal if one does not exist yet)

Now, I don't mind sharing this module, with the disclaimer that I've only ever tested it in my specific case. If any more experienced Drupal developer took a look at my code, they'd probably roll their eyes in disbelief, as I haven't adhered to any style guides or anything. (And I haven't been doing professional software development for the past 15 years.)

For integration I mean a

scislaghi commented 26 February 2014 at 16:45

For integration I mean a single point for registration/login and shared user data. More or less what you have done. I understand your answer and I agree with it, especially for the not actively maintained module.
However, I think that if the advanced forum is not more actively maintained and there are no official, stable, supported bridges for third party forum softwares, drupal is failing something. Forum is an important part where there's not investment actually I see. The standard drupal forum, the same one we're writing on now, is far away from actual forum technologies .

Ste

If you are only looking at

Jaypan commented 27 February 2014 at 00:27

If you are only looking at forum software, you can't really go wrong with vBulletin.

You sure can! Up until version 3, vBulletin was good. Then it was sold to a new company, and most of the original developers left. The new owners tried to add a bunch of social networking features in V4, and it got a little weird, and it's absolute crap as of V5. They have lost a significant number of sites. There are countless stories on the net about V5: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=vbulletin+5+su...

Sucky vB?

jryi commented 27 February 2014 at 09:02

Sheesh, never understood it was going that bad. We had some problems when changing from vB3 to vB4 and now our site's owner is considering upgrading to vB5. I guess I have to let him know that reception has not been exactly flowingly positive. I was mainly comparing vB to phpBB, and the admin and moderator tools in the former are way superior. I'm not sure if Drupal Advanced Forums is an option for us, as there is no Tapatalk integration, and it's a very popular way for our forum visitors to read the discussions.

So now I'm interested in getting suggestions for good forum software for a site with some 30k weekly visitors. One that is reasonably easy to integrate with Drupal. (If I've managed to do it for phpBB and vB4, I guess it's possible for some other forum SW as well.)

Yeah, one of the busiest

Jaypan commented 27 February 2014 at 09:15

Yeah, one of the busiest forums here in Japan had to shut down a few months ago, because they upgraded to VB5, and it was so buggy, it essentially made the site unusable. There was no path to revert back to VB4, so they threw in the towel.

After that I started looking into it and realized that this was a widespread problem. If VB4 is working for you, stick with it until/unless you find something else. Or if you upgrade, make sure to take a backup and test, test, test before committing!

=-=

VM commented 26 February 2014 at 19:23

Some forum posts suggest the use of advanced forum, however this project seems no more under development accoring to drupal site.

I don't see that on the project page at all. In fact the commit log indicates activity as of 5 months ago on the D7 version. The original developer stepped down but the project itself continues on.

drupal is failing something. Forum is an important part where there's not investment actually I see.

I'm seeing fewer and fewer forum centric sites these days. The users who actually use the forum.module in core would need to band together to push the project forward.

I run a forum that used to be

Jaypan commented 27 February 2014 at 00:33

I run a forum that used to be a phpbb forum, that I tried to integrate with Drupal. It turned into a nightmare for a few reasons. The first was that the bridge between the two was spotty. Some things worked, some things didn't. But the main issue I ran into was that it was basically two systems instead of one. Users had one user page on the forum, and another on Drupal. The content in the forum was not really usable in Drupal, and the content in Drupal was not usable in the forum. And the admin was separate for the two systems. The integration between the two was fairly limited, basically it was users (when it worked), and a few other things like 'last post' and a couple of other minor things.

So I switched it to Drupal with Advanced Forum (which is not at all an abandoned project). I lost a lot of functionality that was provided by phpbb (a dedicated forum software), but with some add-on modules I was able to regain most of this functionality. And because the forum was now in Drupal, it was a fully-integrated system with one admin, one login, and one user page. I've been using it for 3 years now, and it's by far a much better situation than when I was trying to run the two systems side-by-side.

tapatalk

konrad_u commented 17 March 2014 at 04:54

there is a tapatalk plugin now for drupal, however it's not a contributed module - I've tested plugin and it seems to work.

on other note, I've migrated this forum from phpBB to D7. Most challenging were text formats but overall the process was easy.

What was your conclusion?

djov commented 6 October 2014 at 11:40

Hello scislaghi, I am doing a similar research as you have been doing.

I've got a warning from my (Drupal) host about having many forums on the website: "the cost of hosting these forums based on Drupal will be astronomical.".

I have found some new moves in https://groups.drupal.org/forum-development, under Harmony.

But curious: what was your conclusion of your research?

Thanks, Dusko

_

WorldFallz commented 6 October 2014 at 15:22

"the cost of hosting these forums based on Drupal will be astronomical."

on it's face, that's an absurd statement. There's nothing inherently more costly about drupal forum posts vs article posts. What do they mean by 'cost'?

I agree, in that I ran a

Jaypan commented 6 October 2014 at 16:19

I agree, in that I ran a Drupal forum previously for about $25/month. Not astronomical by any means.

Thanks WorldFallz and Jaypan

djov commented 11 October 2014 at 10:58

Thanks WorldFallz and Jaypan for your interest.

Disclosure: my research was triggered by the statement "there are many ways to do it wrong – either by choosing not scalable modules like ‘forum’" on https://omega8.cc/the-biggest-misunderstanding-ever-122.

I cannot say what precisely is meant by "the cost of hosting these forums based on Drupal will be astronomical", but I can give you the full sentence where it is mentioned:

"If you plan to host "thousands of forums" you should not use Drupal for this purpose. Drupal is the worst choice for forum-like sites. You should look for some dedicated and professional yet compact forum app instead. Otherwise the cost of hosting these forums based on Drupal will be astronomical."

Any trace of scislaghi, and his/her conclusion on this topic?

The Drupal forum module is

Jaypan commented 11 October 2014 at 13:26

The Drupal forum module is built on Drupal core, and is as scalable as Drupal is - which is to say quite. Using the entity cache module, and even using alternate caching mechanisms like varnish, or Redis, will make it even faster.

In other words, I disagree with the article writer.

_

WorldFallz commented 11 October 2014 at 19:06

I totally agree with jaypan. A drupal forum is just a specifically configured content type with taxonomy and some templates. For an actual case study, see:

The statement you quote is just that.... a statement. Without evidence or facts to back it up it's just an opinion that may or may not be true.

=-=

VM commented 11 October 2014 at 19:10

who runs "thousands of forums"? and what exactly does that mean? thousands on a single install? The statements made cause more questions than they answer.

Hello, thanks all for your

djov commented 14 October 2014 at 19:28

Hello, thanks all for your reactions.

About "thousands of forums". I am investigating a possibility to build a community website in Drupal, where certain open source items will be discussed. (Precisely: reusable best practices for technology development). There will be thousands of best practices to discuss, and formulations of best practices will go through versions. (Formally stated as atomic requirements specifications).
I have investigated a mechanism that each discussed best practice is a forum, and each version of a best practice a forum topic, so that people can provide comments on a version (forum topic), and then when a new version is formulated, it is the next forum topic withing the given best practice (forum).

Btw, are you getting notification emails when there is a new comment in this discussion? I had a good look at my profile around here, and I see that I can set notification emails only for issues, but not for discussion updates...

Greetz, Dusko