Drupal Forum Review - Forum Features & Requirements

Thu July 15, 2010 23:49 |
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Current version 6.7 (June 2, 2010).
Released under GPL License.
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What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free software that allows individual or community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a website. The primary goal of Drupal is to provide a really powerful framework on which you can install additional packages to get the website you dream.

As a CMS, Drupal is not firstly targetted on the management of a forum software, but it however contains, in its default package, a Forum module, that allows you to plug a board to your website, including all features of Drupal (friendly URLs, users management, content publishing,...)

Drupal is a free open source software, and serves many big websites, like the US White House website, official France portal,...

Why reviewing a CMS?

Indeed, it could come out that a CMS is not really suited for supporting a forum software, because its module could not be as powerful as a dedicated software would be. You have to think that a community is not the only thing you want to host on your website. Posting articles, tips, ideas and reviews on a forum is, of course, possible, but maybe there are some other better way to do that. One of the possible solution is a CMS or a blog, which, with articles or blog entries won't prevent you from having comments, and could of course be related to an additional forum topic.

Here are some use cases of a CMS. Look at this list carefully before thinking to a forum-only website:

  • Community web portals
  • Discussion sites
  • Corporate web sites
  • Intranet applications
  • Personal web sites or blogs
  • Aficionado sites
  • E-commerce applications
  • Resource directories
  • Social Networking sites
  • Collaborative authoring environments
  • Podcasting
  • Picture galleries
  • File uploads and downloads

If your idea is in this list, then you should take some times to read this review to see if Drupal could match your desires.

Review Updates

  • June 16, 2010: Some updates.
  • March 25, 2009: Additional Modules have been added to the review to explain how to improve a default Drupal installation.

Recommended Average Size of a Community

This chart represents the recommendation of an average community size hosted with Drupal Forum.

Drupal Forum
Community Size Average

Server & Clients Requirements

Server Requirements
Server Technology
The technology on which this forum software is based on.
PHP
Operating Systems Details
Systems supporting this software.
LinuxWindows Server 2003
Windows XPSolaris
FreeBSDOpenBSD
NetBSDWindows Server 2008
Mac OS
Web Servers Details
Web servers host the forum software.
  • Apache 1.3
  • Apache 2.0/2.2
  • Microsoft IIS
  • Lighttpd
  • Nginx
Languages Details
Development language.
  • PHP 4
  • PHP 5
Databases Details
Systems that store forum datas.
  • MySQL
  • Postgresql
Browsers & Clients Requirements
Compatible Browsers Details
List of compatible browsers.
Mozilla FirefoxInternet Explorer
Google ChromeOpera
Apple SafariKonqueror
Mozilla SeaMonkey
Required Plugins/Technologies Details
What the user needs exactly to use this forum correctly.
HTML, Javascript, AJAX, CSS.
Languages supported by Drupal Forum.
Yes Yes.
Supported Languages:
Afrikaans Afrikaans Amharic Amharic
Armenian Armenian Bosnian Bosnian
Bulgarian Bulgarian Catalan Catalan
Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Traditional)
Croatian Croatian Czech Czech
Danish Danish Dutch Dutch
English (American) English (American) English (British) English (British)
Estonian Estonian Filipino Filipino
Finnish Finnish French French
Galician Galician German German
Greek Greek Hebrew Hebrew
Hindi Hindi Hungarian Hungarian
Icelandic Icelandic Japanese Japanese
Kannada Kannada Khmer Khmer
Korean (South) Korean (South) Latvian Latvian
Lithuanian Lithuanian Malayalam Malayalam
Marathi Marathi Mongolian Mongolian
Nepali Nepali Norwegian Norwegian
Persian Persian Polish Polish
Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese (Brazilian) Portuguese (Brazilian)
Punjabi Punjabi Romanian Romanian
Serbian Serbian Slovak Slovak
Spanish Spanish Swahili Swahili
Swedish Swedish Tamil Tamil
Telugu Telugu Thai Thai
Turkish Turkish Ukrainian Ukrainian

Supported Languages could be found here:

Drupal - User Register
Drupal - User Register

Drupal is known to work in every configuration which accepts the PHP scripting language. It means that operating systems and web servers that are supporting Drupal are not all listed here.

SQLite database should be normally supported in the next major release of Drupal 7.0.

Forum Threads & Posts

Forum Threads
Forum Style
General appearance of the topics.
Flat/Threaded
Thread Icons
An icon that identifies the type of a topic.
Yes Yes
Forum Organization
Organize your forum with categories, sections,...
  • Forum Categories
  • Sub Sections
Topic Tags
Could topics be organized by tags?
Yes Yes
Sticky Threads
Sticky threads stay at top of a section or a forum.
Yes Yes
Spell Checking
Posts and topics are spelled checked with a dictionary.
Plugin Plugin
Related Threads
List additional topics that may be related to the current one.
- -
Detect Duplicate Threads
Duplicate Threads are detected before creation.
No No
Hidden Topics
Some topics are only accessible to a limited list of users.
No No
Posts
Message Editing Form Details
Details about the manner to post messages.
  • Plain Text
  • WYSIWYG Editor
  • Preview Button
 Emoticons Details Plugin Plugin
Attachments Details
Attach files (screenshot, archive,...) with a post.
Plugin Plugin Syntax Highlighting
Posted Source Code is formatted using colors.
Plugin Plugin
Image Attachment
How images can be attached and displayed in message posts.
  • Upload via Classic Attachments. Images are all at the end of the post.
  • Upload via Advanced Attachments. Images can be placed in the flow of message text.
  • Use BBCode or HTML. Need to type the URL of an already hosted image.
Post Editing Format Details
Markup Language (HTML, Wiki, BBCode,...).
  • Plain
  • HTML
 Post by Email
Post to a topic directly from your email box.
No No
Message Rating
Users can rate the quality of other users posts.
Plugin Plugin Message Quoting
Quoting a post helps readers understand who answers who.
Plugin Plugin
Announcements
Administrators can post announcements that are displayed everywhere in the forum. It is even more powerful than a pinned topic.
Plugin Plugin

Key Features & Additional Tools

Key Features
Bundled Softwares
Softwares that are also available with the forum.
  • Website Home Page
  • CMS
  • Blog
  • Pictures Album Manager
 Users List
List of all user accounts, to helps users searching their friends.
Yes Yes
Private Messages Details
Users can communicate using an internal messaging system.
Plugin Plugin Online Users List
List of actually connected users, in the forum home page, a dedicated topic,...
Plugin Plugin
Instant Messaging Details
Communicate in the forum like in other IM (Yahoo Messenger, Live Messenger, Google Talk,...)
Plugin Plugin RSS/Atom Syndication Details
New posts and threads available using aggregators Syndicate
RSS 2.0
Calendar Yes Yes Remote Control Details
Remote control from external softwares or websites.
  • XML/RPC
Poll Creation Details Yes Yes Friendly URLs
URLs are explicit and contains information about the topic (title, message,...). This is highly recommended for SEO purposes.
Yes Yes

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Here are a list of essential modules that complete a core installation of Drupal, for a forum usage:

The Flat or Threaded view of your forum will depend on the Drupal Theme you use.

 
 
Forum Features &
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