Artesian Forum

Artesian will be a module for facilitating discussions with a forum-like interface. While it offers much of the familiarity of traditional forum modules, it is designed to be flexible and customizable to fit other discussion formats as well. The forums can be a distinct area of your site or integrated into other areas, such as Organic Groups.

Current status

July 10, 2014
Two years ago, I burnt out on Drupal after donating a huge chunk of my life to it for 7 years. As a result, this module never made it past the early development stage. Now that I've come back to Drupal, I keep thinking about this and hate to leave it unfinished. My first priority is dusting off my skills and finding full time Drupal employment as life has put me in the role of breadwinner for our family now but, once I've settled in and have an income, I know I will want to get back to working in contrib.

My intention is to start over with this in Drupal 8 since there is other forum work already going on in Drupal 7 and I think Artesian will be much easier to write with the more complete entity system that Drupal 8 brings. At the moment, this is nothing more than a vague idea and likely won't see any real coding until early next year but I wanted to replace my previous status that basically proclaimed this dead with some hope now that I am back in the community. :)

Existing code for the curious: https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/Michelle/1361070
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Architecture & differences from Drupal core's Forum

Artesian is not based on Drupal core's Forum module and there are architectural differences between them such as:

• Core forum is based on Taxonomy, Node, and Comment. Each forum is a taxonomy term, the starting post in a thread is a node, and the replies are comments. Artesian is based on custom entities which gives more flexibility and overcomes many of the limitations found in core that come from being tied to terms, nodes, and comments.
• Core forum provides a single page which lists the forums at /forum and then each individual forum has a page at /forum/N. Topics are not part of the forum as far as the menu system knows and so show up at /node/N as usual. Artesian encapsulates the forum listings (you can have more than one) into forum group entities and each forum is also an entity. This makes them portable and can be placed anywhere on your site. Threads in Artesian know which forum(s) they belong to and show up in the menu system accordingly.
• (list unfinished)

Features

To be written... Artesian will have all the typical forum features as well as some Drupal-specific goodies.

Need a forum right now?

If you need a forum now, I suggest using Advanced Forum. There will be a conversion utility available to convert from Advanced Forum to Artesian once Artesian is ready for production use. The main "gotcha" is that the AF styles will not be compatible with Artesian styles and so there may be some conversion pain if you heavily modify your forum style. Your data, however, will convert so you can safely use AF now and evaluate Artesian for your needs once it is ready.