Learn Forum Module in Drupal 6

Forum Go along to the Forum section under the By module view to begin working with it:


The first option, Configure permissions, is without doubt very important but we will discuss this particular issue later on when we deal with users, roles and permissions in next chapter. The final option, Get help, provides a nice summary of what the module in question does, how it works, and a bit about how to make use of it—along with links to any pertinent help on the Drupal site.

This leaves us with the Forums option in the middle that, when clicked, presents the following page for configuring the site's forums:


How to organize a forum really depends on how broad the scope of the discussion topics are going to be, how many people will be using the forums, and the nature of the topics up for discussion. What you are aiming for is an intuitive, logical, easy-to-use structure that will facilitate and encourage discussion by allowing users to easily find information, as opposed to frustrating them with a poor structure that effectively hides topics—this is a general problem and not one that is unique to Drupal.

Let's take a look at how to go about organizing an example wildlife and conservation forum. A good idea is to draw out the structure beforehand so that you can see how everything relates, and make changes before creating or deleting forums. For example, it may seem logical to split up forums depending on location, so that people in the US go straight to the North American forums and people in Africa go straight to the African forums.

Unfortunately, this has several drawbacks because there would be a lot of repeated topics for each continent (since wildlife issues are the same the world over). Even worse, if someone living in the States was concerned about canned lion hunting in South Africa, where would they go to discuss this, Africa or North America? It seems that partitioning forums based on location, in this instance, is probably not a good idea.

The best way to do it is by issue. People want to discuss issues or topics, so they naturally look for content based on these criteria. When looked at in this light, the meaning of the add containers tab becomes clear, because now we can organize forum topics based on their common issues.

In Drupal, a container holds a grouping of forums, so adding a container based on common issues for a number of forums is a very logical way to break up forums into intuitive chunks. For example, one of the major areas of concern for wildlife today is the topic of conservation. This in turn has many facets, all of which would no doubt be of interest to a concerned audience. The environment is also an issue that should be discussed, and everyone is interested in research these days. These all seem like viable containers because they logically encapsulate the bulk of what people using this site will discuss.

Moving ahead on this line of thought, each of the potential containers has distinct sub-categories that users would intuitively understand as topics for debate—we'll see the actual structure I came up with in a moment.

Once you have a nice structure jotted down on paper, it is time to actually implement the forums on the site. Let's set about this by creating the containers first. Click Add container to bring up a page to specify the name of the container, a brief description, the parent, and a weight.

Since you should have already decided on a structure, it is easy to see which container or forum has which parent. The top-level container should obviously leave the parent as . You can set the weight of the container or forum if you would like them to be presented in an order other than alphabetical—the smaller the weight, the closer to the top of the pile it will appear.

Keep adding containers and forums, along with helpful descriptions until the entire structure is complete. The following screenshot shows an example structure for the putative wildlife and conservation forum. (There are, no doubt, more topics that could be added or changed, but this suffices for the moment.)

There are a few things to note here. First of all, there is some overlap in terms of how categories mesh on a conceptual level. For example, Global Warming should logically appear under Pollution, so why does it have its own forum? The answer is that you need to think about which issues are likely to be most important. As Carbon Emissions are currently a huge talking point, it warrants a promotion to its own forum even though it is conceptually a subcategory of pollution.

Secondly, I have only added a single parent layer of containers, with forums appearing under them. It is possible to add containers and forums within other containers and forums, and so on, but in the interests of making it easy to find topics, try keeping a at structure instead of creating a deep navigation structure wherever possible. It is easier for people to search a list than to navigate a deep hierarchy.

Finally, there are some generic configuration options that warrant some attention. Most of the defaults are pretty sensible, but you may wish to click the Settings tab, and decide on such things as how many posts to display in one go and in which order:


Once you are done, click Save configuration and the forum is more or less ready to go. Before we continue with configuring the other enabled modules, here's a quick peek at how a registered user would view the forum that has been set up so far:


Not bad for a few minutes work! The best thing about this forum is that it is easily modified to adapt to how the community makes use of it—adding, renaming or removing containers and forums is very easy. Just be careful not to continuously modify your forums because this can make it dif cult to use and frustrating for members.

In reality, you should play around with each and every module, and ensure that it is working to your satisfaction. We don't have space to do so here, so it is left to you to post some comments and replies and get a feel of how things work.
OdayPele "Life runs unpredictable". With my educational background I bet you won't believe of being who I am now. Though I knew life is not as simply as unreal world in cyber life but it has led me to enter my professionalism in carrier, bussiness and creation which support to my whole of life.

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