Forum/taxonomy design for a new site

By karger on 15 Oct 2003 at 01:55 UTC

I'm investigating the use of drupal as the bulletin board for our school, and I would like a better understanding of the role/use of forums in such a site. As far as I can tell, the main (only?) effect of forums is to create an extra level of hierarchy in the site. ie, within a given forum, i can create a new forum topic within which users can post stories. But it seems I can do the same thing by creating an extra level of the taxonomy. Why are these treated/presented differently? And what criteria should I use to decide which of these options to select?

As a minor side issue, I've been unable to find any instructions on how to associate icons with the various topics/subtopics. Any pointers would be appreciated.

Comments

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moshe weitzman commented 15 October 2003 at 02:01

The effect of a forum is to give a 'space' for users to post into and read. You are right that taxonomy establishes virtually the same thing. But I think the social nature of a defined forum for reading and writing is significant.

Forum module also optimizes it queries for heavy volume. Also, it provides links to the next unread in the forum, for example. So it is quite specialized conmpared to random postings into a taxonomy.

If it establishes "virtually

karger commented 15 October 2003 at 03:47

If it establishes "virtually the same thing" why not fully unify them? It seems that the differences come down to some limited variations in the UI.

ui matters

moshe weitzman commented 15 October 2003 at 11:50

don't trivialize the user experience provided by forum.module. it is significant

Actually i was arguing the ot

karger commented 15 October 2003 at 21:02

Actually i was arguing the other way around: the forum module is a very effective UI for arranging discussions hierarchically, so why not
unify forums with taxonomy so that you always have access to that power. What is gained by having a taxonomy that is _NOT_ a forum?

flexibility

halfelven commented 16 October 2003 at 00:31

There are uses of the taxonomy that would not be appropriately organized as a forum.

examples?

(not verified) commented 17 October 2003 at 12:33

examples?

Example

(not verified) commented 17 October 2003 at 14:55

My site uses solely taxonomy. Forums would not make sense with only static pages. http://mail.newmmc.com/~wsmith/drupal

This is a typical argument

(not verified) commented 17 October 2003 at 18:50

Arguments like this are worth having, but realize that they are very typical in the development of any content management system: the various types of content resemble each other a lot, so why do we need different systems for them? Why not have 1 type of content that tries to do everything (Drupal already does that to a high degree).

There are good reasons to keep certain types of content separate in code and presentation:
- optimizing code for certain types of interactions.
- optimizing the UI
- Having everything as 1 type of content makes it harder to introduce those small, specific things that do make a forum effective (you always have to think about the effect on other elements).

There are also good reasons to make things the same (like Drupal does by making a lot of things a 'node'):
- everything can reuse the same code (versioning, shared properties, ...)

I think Drupal strikes a good balance. I also think joining forum and taxonomy would be a BIG mistake. The way the original poster uses taxonomy might be similar to the way the forum is used, but there are many other uses, and Drupal's taxonomy module is only at it's earliest start.

My 0.02c.

and

(not verified) commented 17 October 2003 at 18:51

Let me just add that thinking of taxonomies as hierarchies is very limiting - the taxonomy will undoubtedly evolve way beyond that. The reason it looks similar to the forum module right now is that it is still very simple.

Forum.module and taxonomy.module

dmjossel commented 18 October 2003 at 07:01

I agree; the user experience that Forum does (and/or should provide) is distinct from Taxonomy. Taxonomy is general purpose, and can and should be used for read/write as well as read-only areas: stories, images, blogs, which may or may not be hubs for commentary.

In fact, if anything, forum.module needs to add some of the (many) features it is currently missing that other similar forums have (phpBB and WebBBS come to mind.

Those include:

Quotation
Ability for anonymous posters to use any name (many users still eschew registration requirements)
Better threading display (right now, while you look at a message in threaded view mode, the hierarchy of the thread is hidden from you, requiring extra clicks if you wish to access a thread in anything other than sequential order, which is not always desirable).
RSS feeds. (Drupal does feeds for nodes, why not for comments?)

I did quick and dirty modifications on a CVS version of Drupal more than a year ago to provide these, but they've been lost in my last upgrade (to 4.2) and I'm waiting for 4.3 to freeze before I make another attempt.