I hit a point tonight where I decided I really need to get my website to Drupal 7 and that has pushed up working on changing AF over to using a pluggable back end / entities way sooner than I had planned. I decided to start this discussion to get some thoughts out there and also so people are aware of what I'm working on since the code won't be on d.o any time soon.
There's some early thoughts here, though that's dealing with the forums themselves being entities: http://drupal.org/node/755438
At the moment, I'm focused on making the posts entities. Some reasoning behind that, in no particular order:
- Forum replies are not lesser than forum topic starting posts as they are with the old blog + comments idea.
- Consistency in fields between topic starter and replies. Comments being fieldable was a leap forward and this isn't a huge issue, but it's nice to not have to redo field stuff on both.
- Easier moderation. Can grab a section of posts and set it to be a new topic without having to change the type of the first post. Merge two topics together.
- Easier to import from other forum software that doesn't distinguish between the starting post and the replies.
- Any view / query that needs to deal with both the starting post and the replies is easier. In D6, you can't merge comments and nodes in a view. I don't know if that has changed in D7.
- Search returns results from starter/replies.
- Revision history on all posts. (Not sure if this is an issue with D7 comments)
- Fined grained access control. Can do things like allow time limited access to editing.
- Not overloading the node table with hundreds of thousands of nodes on busy sites with a lot of posts as Node Comments will do.
The pluggable part comes in because I don't want to completely ditch core forum. Well, ok, I want to, but I don't think it's a good idea. I think a big part of why AF became popular while other attempts didn't was that I presented it as a wrapper around core rather than this whole other "thing" that you were locked into. By decoupling the add-on parts of AF from the post storage / forum config stuff as much as possible, I should, in theory, be able to support both core forum with the node + comment system and the new entity system. If I can't, well, then I don't know. For my own site I will be using the new system and that is where my focus is. We'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it, I guess.
My first step is a lot of reading. I've barely paid any attention to D7 since I was so focused on D6 and I'm frightfully far behind. I need to get a good grasp on entities and working with them. Then I need to do some detective work in AF to figure out where it all hooks into core forum and see how much of that can be abstracted out. Then I need to make stuff work with entities in addition / instead. I'm going to be playing with this all in my own dev environment and won't be committing anything for a while. The 2.x branch is just barely in Alpha so I hate to officially branch now and deal with all that double duty in D7 on top of keeping D6 going. Once I have something worth showing, I may just do a sandbox or something with it until 2.x gets to a sensible branching point. We'll see. I'm only at the beginning stages of this so may change my mind once I get going.
Michelle