Theming Drupal Forum to look like phpBB 3

	Answerbase	Quicksilver
Plugins	No	Yes
Themes	Yes	Yes
Captcha	Yes	No
Syndication	RSS 2.0	No.
Emoticons	No	Yes
Avatars	Yes	Yes

Score:		Users:	7.7/10 (7 votes)

Tue January 18, 2011 01:00

The aim of this article is to describe what we did to vastly improve the default and basic Drupal forum module, only by following the rules of this CMS, meaning that we never modified any existing core files of the Drupal installation. The following tips are just made using the multiple extensibility abilities that Drupal provides by default, because it is never recommended to modify the default files (more particularly when you need to upgrade your current version of Drupal, and generally lose at this time most of the hacks you put in the core system). Our basic goal was to theme Drupal to make it look like phpBB 3.

List of Tips

We hope that the following tips could be interesting for other people that try to use the Drupal Forum module as an official replacement for their existing forum software, and this way, by centralizing all their website data inside of the same application.

Here are the modifications you can expect after some improvements of the basic forum module.

Forum Homepage Before:	Forum Homepage After:

Forum Topic Before:	Forum Topic After:

The default theme has been inspired by the default PhpBB theme, that looks very simple and clear, and could demonstrate that a Drupal forum could easily compete with one the most used forum software. Please also note the first plan was not to use Advanced Forum module, that entirely modifies the basic forum module of Drupal, and more over, not particularly in the way we think a forum should look like.

You want to know more about an improvement we did in our Discussion Forum and that we haven't covered here? Comments below are here for that, so do not hesitate to post your questions and comments there.

Keywords:

Comments (5)

If you don't want to use AF,

by Michelle (?), Thu January 20, 2011 17:39

If you don't want to use AF, that's fine, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't spread misinformation about it.

1) AF does not modify core forum at all. It builds on top of it but all the code is in AF. There are no core hacks required.

2) AF is completely themeable. Making an AF style that looks exactly like you have there wouldn't be hard at all. In fact, it was done already for an earlier AF version. So saying it doesn't look like you think a forum should look is rather like saying Drupal doesn't look like you think a CMS should because you don't care for Garland.

3) Competing with PhpBB is far more involved than superficial changes in theme and AF goes a long way towards that goal though it's not there, yet, in some areas. While your tips will get a nicer looking forum, and that may be fine for some, you aren't doing much to enhance the functionality.

Michelle

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