Forum Software Reviews

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

• Drupal Tip #1: Add Smileys to your forum
• Drupal Tip #2: Message Quoting
• Drupal Tip #3: Post Advanced Formatting
• Drupal Tip #4: Add "Views Count" column
• Drupal Tip #5: Add a "Who is online?" block
• Drupal Tip #6: Add a breadcrumb to your forum
• Drupal Tip #7: Use Custom Thread Icons
• Drupal Tip #8: Hide Specific Forum Containers
• Drupal Tip #9: Theme Forum Topics
• Drupal Tip #10: Beautiful User Profile in Topics
• Drupal Tip #11: Friendly URLs in your forum with Pathauto

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.

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