By Slade8 on

So after comparing various CMS software I decided to give Drupal a try. So far I really like the content management and I've spent about a week and a half reading up on the various things I can do to get up to speed. But I have a few questions that I haven't been able to find the answer to.

Is there a way for a user to easily show new forum posts since their last visit on a single page. I've tried the advanced forum module and that doesn't seem to have it. I just want a button that they can click on the forum like you can with most forum software.

Is there a way to link content with the forum. For example if I have a "Cars" content type and write an article about a Honda could that article also show up on a forum entitled "Cars" where the comments would be linked to the forum. SMF and some other forum software does this when you add news items it adds it to the forum also and any comments go there. The reason I ask is I'm trying to tightly integrate the forums with my site and having users commenting on articles as well as going to the forum seems a bit redundant. It would be nice if it could be more tightly integrated. It seems like this would be one of the main benefits of having forum software integrated with drupal.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

scoutbaker’s picture

scoutbaker commented

You should look into the Views module. It can make lists, pages, blocks, etc. of just about whatever you want.

As far as linking content and the forums, you could do what drupal.org does. The items you see on the front page are forum postings. When something is important enough, it gets promoted to the front page.

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cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

You can go to admin/content/taxonomy, edit the "Forums" vocabulary, and select more content types ("Story", etc). Then you will be able to select a forum when you create or edit posts of that type.

Or the opposite, as ScoutBaker suggested, you can include forum posts in views, taxonomy listings, or promote them to the front page.

About recent posts there is the tracker module which you can enable in admin/build/modules, there are some blocks in admin/build/block, there is the view module, and there are several contributed modules which you can find if you search for recent posts, recent comments etc in the "Search downloads" box on the right sidebar here.

Slade8’s picture

Slade8 commented

I'm aware of views and I've watched video tutorials and read stuff on it. I've done some views to sort articles by certain variables but I don't see any node types for unread content that I could filter to only show forum content. I've searched the support area for views and I've done numerous searches. The closest I came was an example for views1 done almost a year ago and I can't figure out from that how to do it in views2. Quite frankly I'm a little baffled why a "show unread" posts function isn't included by default or at least very well documented. Like honestly is there any other forum software that doesn't have this feature. I've spent hours on this and it's extremely frustrating because all other forums have this feature out of the box.

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

As I said, there is the tracker module which you can enable. That is what you see in http://drupal.org/tracker

There is also a Tracker view in admin/build/views. You could try cloning a tracker_forum view from that and adding some filters such as "Node: Has new content" and "Taxonomy: Vocabulary = Forums".