Advanced forum is a theme/glue module that enhances Drupal's core forum module. The included styles provide the look typically found in stand alone forum software and the code provides some of the functionality, mostly related to the end user experience. By adding other Drupal contributed modules, many of which are automatically used by Advanced Forum, you can achieve much of what stand alone software provides. Because it uses the core forum module, it uses the node and comment system built into Drupal and is completely integrated, not a bridge.

Dependencies

• Requires: Forum, taxonomy, comments, Author Pane, phptemplate based theme
• Recommended: Statistics (for views counter) and Flatcomments (to avoid issues due to the underlying threads when forums are visually set flat.)
• Others: For a complete forum package, see this list of other contrib modules.

Features

Note: This list includes only those features provided by Advanced Forum itself and is not a complete list of what is possible for forums in Drupal.

General

• Mark all topics in a single forum or all forums as read.
• Forum statistics including number of topics, posts, users, latest user, and currently online users.
• Interchangeable style system that allows you to create an entirely new forum style outside of your theme.
• Six included styles including a base style meant for customizing and a blue style ready for use and easily recolored.
• Optionally use buttons for links with common buttons included in the styles.

Forum listing

• Shows number of new posts in addition to core's number of new topics.
• Displays title of most recent topic in forum linked to the newest comment in that topic.
• Removes link to post new topic here and forces users to be in the forum they are posting to to avoid confusion.
• Icon for each forum that changes with new posts and includes legend.

Topic listing

• Option to hide created column for more compact listings.
• Includes a pager along with the title on each multipage topic.
• Shows last update as "time ago" for recent posts and switches to date posted for older ones. Cutoff is configurable.
• Shows number of views.
• Legend explaining icons for "hot", etc.
• Already includes new forum icons that will be a part of Drupal 7.
• Shadow topics link to actual topic rather than the forum it was moved to.
• Extra classes around sticky section so it can be themed separately.

Individual topics

• Makes use of Author Pane module to show avatar as well as stats and contact links for the post author.
• Option to turn off prev/next links (including not running slow query).
• If enabled, makes use of an imagecache preset for user avatar.
• Shows the total number of posts on top of topic along with links to the next unread and last post.
• Includes a post reply link (button) on the top (and bottom if form on separate page) of the topic.
• Changes "add comment" to "reply" on initial post for consistency.
• Uses one template for both node and comments for consistent look and easier styling.
• Build in support for the Signature for Forums module, including adding the signature to the initial post.
• Comment numbering with link and built in support for the Comment Page module as permalink.
• Each post has a link back up to the top.