I am with little success, or to express myself more correct - in very time consuming way building couple communities with Drupal 7. The centerpiece of them has to be some kind of a forum.
At the beginning I was designing them with the Advanced_forum as a centerpiece, but then one day one idea just struck my head like a lightning: why not OG??? There is a perfect example of OG community done exactly right... groups.drupal.org :) There is Commons distro, but the creators not very exactly got to the point of building communication based community - that distro is more content-between-users or whatever else, but not communication, seems they missed smth.
Disclaimer and purpose: Stop for a minute! This is not offensive post, I will show an example, how I am going to build or already implemented some of the critical features with already available modules, instead of Forum and ask the others to concentrate more on OG-based solutions and leave under-appreciated Artesian forum maintainer alone and work on other things
You think the main problem with Drupal based forums if we compare them to other BB software is the lack of features? No! And one more time no! So, lets start with common features, which can be implemented in D7:
EASILY DONE:
Forum containers/forums: Organic Groups. It is the head and the backbone of all the community. It gives lots of control to the content on the specific group, depending on your permission level. As of 7.x-2.x version it is very, very powerful system. Translation to BB: users are allowed to view, to write, to moderate/change content, depending on their status in that particular OG (forum).
Post: drupal built in "Node" ecosystem with all the power of CCK/Fields, WYSIWYG editors, IMCE/Fields file managing for attachments and so on. There is possible to make different post for discussion, event, wiki, gallery, poll and so on. Most of simpler BB cannot do that much.
Reply: as of D7 comments are fully fieldable! You can get almost as much as from original Post, the only significant problems are that you cannot for example make reply gallery type to gallery post and comments are of different entity type to original post - more about it later.
Topic: Post + Reply. There is possible to select comment form to be on the same page as topic. Nice, quick and simple.
Private message: there is powerful module with
the same name.
Poll: 1 core module and at least 2 maintained and widely used 3rd party poll modules.
List of topics: Views. It is possible to get easily all the posts with their titles in one particular group or all of them and sort by replies count.
Social integration - AddThis and location
WHAT DRUPAL HAS, OTHER BB DO NOT:
Contextual display of content - most of the BB have just few hardcoded supplemental stuff which can be displayed in different piece of content. Context (which I like very much) or Panels are far more powerful than any of them.
Theming/templating - from my shallow experience in other CMS, Drupal has really good theming system, far more flexible, extensible and separated form site logic than most of the other BB's.
Fielding, displaying of fields - Fields and Display Suite have enormous power over how content is structured and how it is presented.
Menu/navigation - none of the BB's have such complex and at the same time flexible and easy to build navigation
SEO ready - Proper use of Path, Pathauto, Metatag, robots.txt modules alone will solve 50%+ of on-site optimization tasks, also most of popular themes are out of the box SEO friendly, like AT or Omega. Other BB's have very narrow or paid SEO modules, usually maintained by 1 or very small group of devs, which can lead to "vendor traps"
Hundreds of usable and maintained small modules instead of few do-it-all - there are many of the small community modules, which can be combined to make different "mashups" of functionality far more powerful than any of BB's
Voting - Voting API and other are much more flexible that any of the BB's I have seen. Of course, with the help of Views and Rules some interesting display combinations can be made.
Radioactivity - one simple module on the league of its own. I am a huge fan of it! Lists of currently hot content are already pre-installed for you!
Imagecache- easily transform image into the size you want. No alternatives in most other BB's. For example, such a feature like "display image in header of forum container" is implemented as separate module in other BB's, but it is done easily with Views.
Security/Antispam - lost of modules on most popular cases. Really. Your forum will be safe from spammers/script kiddies. Drupal security team has serious attitude to their tasks.
Views. Views is like an UI to SQL command line. You can tweak your lists of topics all day long, instead of only few hardcoded options in other CMS. No alternatives there.
Many small modules - many different modules for many different purposes, with very little chance to get into "CMS trap"
DONE WITH SOME EFFORT:
List of topics - how many times topic is viewed?: Views + some stats module. You have to choose between GA or some internal ones. There are some caveats as GA "Do not track" or caching compatibility in internal ones.
Subscription to topics - There are some useful modules to get emails, but currently I am going with Message + Rules + Flags. The others to try: Watcher, Subscription framework
Marking content - Flag module + some Rules can be used to mark content as abusive, to bookmark it, to "view it later" and other similar user-related operations
Displaying author info - sadly the most used module - Author Pane is the most buggy, but there are many other ways to display contextual info about author in the topic page. Some PHP code may be needed.
Management of topics- VBO is your toolkit. I have not much experience with it, but am certainly sure that operations, such as topic moving between forums, deleting, closing and so on are very doable.
Management/promotion of users - built-in Drupal tools + VBO + Userpoints. Probably you will need to think some logic if you want to manually or automatically promote/punish users, but tools are there
Various permissions - Drupal has many of them built-in, but this is (at least for me) very time and effort consuming part and has to be thought and implemented carefully. There are many helpful 3rd party modules
SSO - Sign on with FB/Google and other popular services usernames. There are some modules which already matured, but still need to test out extensively - have little experience.
At this moment I cannot remember of more important features. I am sure there are more, but at one stage or another I have solved them in site or at least in my head.
Now, the dealbreakers...
WHAT IS VERY IMPORTANT, BUT CANNOT BE DONE IN DRUPAL (at least easily)
Topics and replies are different entities. It sounds simple, but is a huge problem. Why? Because the bread and butter of Drupal - Views cannot construct a list of different entities. There are some workarounds but they are only suitable for simple lists. Nodecomments module solved this for D6, but the maintainer has no plans to work on D7 version.
No statistics for OG. You cannot sort OG group by last reply, post count, topics count, replies, members, etc, also to display last topic or reply. Yep, the similar problem - it is available only for D6, but not D7. There is workaround... Not to use OG, Forum module has this part of these features but then again - we are in the closed loop of having Michelle with no help and far less inferior to OG system. https://drupal.org/project/og_statistics is available for D6, with no work being done on D7.
WHY I AM WRITING THIS?
I am not a coder, at least not in the level to rewrite D6 modules to D7, so... There are 470(!) members on this group, I hope that some part of them is able to code Drupal module. If someone has spare time/resources, please:
Stop relying on Forum/Advanced forum. It is already at its best and is not designed to be a substitute for fully featured BB. Drupal way to build things it to write a small modules which can help to work with big ones: Views, Fields, OG, DS, Context, Panels and so on. It makes no sense to have do-everything forum module as most of the functionality is already here! Please, transfer your efforts on writing how-to's, provide help to OG maintainer, make "bridge" type modules, but forget Forum/Advanced forum.
Rewrite for D7 https://drupal.org/project/og_statistics and https://drupal.org/project/nodecomment. With those modules done I can show you how to build Drupal BB site, comparable to MyBB, IPB and similar, with more features and easier to use than groups.drupal.org
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