How to Set Up Drupal 7 Forums with the Advanced Forum Module

hello and welcome back to the tunnel of said developer com IMPD or ski eternal estate developer specializing drupal and in this video tutorial i'm going to take a look at Drupal's forms specifically the advanced form module in the author pane module that will allow you to take your forms to the next level both of these modules combined along with use and chaos tools provide a little bit more functionality and a little bit of a cooler look for your forms they take them from you know your basic drupal form to turn up to a next level that looks a little bit cleaner a little bit crisper so let's dive right into it when you go over a drupal.org slash project slash advanced as you'll see i've got right here it's not actually my URL that's just what i've typed out and that should be forum when you go over there you can download the advanced form module one of the things that they tell you to do before you actually setup your Vince forms to setup forms themselves so we're going to do that walk right through it pretty quick pretty simple but first thing you're going to do is enable form module at a Drupal core so now that we're here we're gonna go ahead and hit forum the other thing that we want to do is we want to enable statistics so you'll see I've already got checked off make sure that that's checked off for you as well advanced form module make use of that you'll notice I where you got views and views use on views UI you're going to want to get those as well as Kaos tools when you get the advanced form module great so with that we're going to go over to structure we're go into forms and settings one thing I didn't mention is if you haven't watched my other previous videos tutorials you'll know that I always install the admin menu so that's what this is up here great module and I definitely recommend it for all your projects so going into forum settings hot topic threshold ours are going to be a new new forum so we're not going to expect that much activity so room for this is the five what this means is that you know once we have five posts it's identified as a hot topic so topics per page we're just going to keep that down to ten as a minimum and we want the newest to be first so we'll go ahead and save that configuration next thing we want to do because forms are actually based on a content type and using comments what we're going to do is go into our actual content type form topic and we're going to configure the the comments just make sure that they're set up properly so you'll see here I've got open commenting I want threaded comments per page well we'll keep it at ten you know if you have an active site you can go higher than that I just want to make it seem like you know I've got a lot of content going on so if I've got ten per page or I got thirty I got a you know a three pager type saying comment title got that checked off just as it's very annoying no one really uses it that I've ever seen and the other thing is preview comment I got actually put that on the well I'll leave it as optional just don't keep it as a required because it's obviously pretty annoying for users so there we go now that we've got that set up we can go to our home page here and I can go into my forms and you'll see that I've got my general form here um it's you know pretty planes right out of the box from Drupal um not that you know we're bashing Drupal or anything like that but leaves a lot to be desired so before we actually install the events for module one thing I showing you is let's just make sure that we we set up a role not sure how you're going to use your forums but always a good idea to to have roles in the event that you know you're doing some complex things on your site so I'm just going to add a forum user and then with that I'm also going to go over into my people and you send our account settings just going to make sure that they have the option to use a picture so we have pictures we have signatures again those are good for your forms so just make sure you have those checked off allows people to personalize kind of their message so we would at save configuration but no need to is there already set up that way now the last thing we want to do is just check out the permissions now a few things we're going to want to make sure here so just scrolling down comments again because we're based on the comment module one extra view comments I have that as anonymous and authenticated users post comments the same thing my forms are open if your forums aren't open you could take off anonymous take off a Penta cated and just have your forum user which is what we just created this column here is just my administrator so my forms are going to be open skip comment approval only authenticated users and edit own comments only authenticated users also want to check out down in the user so here view user profiles because we're going to have a forum I'm going to enable that users can Kentucky chaw they're out contact each other you know if we added that capability to do so so I would save my permissions and we're good to go there so with that setup let's go ahead and we'll enable the advanced form module to take our forms to the next level so as I mentioned drupal.org slash project slash advanced underscore form so when you do that you're going to need chaos tools so go ahead and get chaos tools get views you see I have advanced form and I'm also going to enable the author pane I'll show you how to configure that one as well pretty neat little module just again takes your forms to the next levels and adds a little professional touch great so with that installed let's go over to configuration we're going to go into content authoring and you'll see we have the advanced form setup page here now great so as you hear that the advanced form module will actually comes with the ability for you to style the form from within the configuration page so see here we got blue lagoon we are cloudless sky naked silver bells I encourage you to try them all out I really vars is blue lagoon but the cool thing about this is you can actually take the TPL files of advanced form module copy them over into your theme and then customize them as you want to the same thing with the CSS files so the CSS and the advanced form module is actually configured such that your style that CSS loads after the advanced form module so you can put in any CSS you want and it will override that that comes with the advanced form module so two ways to customize there and obviously you can go even further if you'd like to but once we have that you can look at the node types of style here again if you have multiple content types that are all associated with your form you would choose those I only have the form topic so that's why I'm leaving that there again style notes here if you want to display them as teasers we're not going to do that but if you were just displaying teasers that's where you would want to select that off we only want to have our form pages attached so our sort of styled so that's where the term comes in forms actually built on taxonomy so that's what that's referencing their style all comments like form replies we're actually gonna have separate comments on our site that are not going to be applicable to the form so we don't want to do that don't want to make a donor confuse users so the tab for the form view page and the tab for the included views you'll see then when we go back to our forms actual homepage there's number of different view tabs that are there so that's what that's coming down there's use a picture preset you know if we wanted to have thumbnails for a user picture preset that's what we choose there and that's pretty much it actually last thing I want to do is I want to have zero for my title for my characters display my titles just because I'm going to be controlling my titles um and if this I run into an issue I can always come back and change this but I just don't want my titles to be cut off so I'm going to go ahead and hit save on that configuration and we'll be good to go so now if we check this out you'll see here if you remember we had that kind of blog looking for before now we've got this new theme kind of form going on that's based upon what we selected in the advanced form selection and you'll see we also got what's going on down here so current active users you know we have one user zero guests right so that's me but there are actually two users on the site these statistics are coming from the statistics module that we that we enabled so again we have zero posts topics and the statistics also when we go for reads you'll see how many reads a person's head so right now these tabs again these are from the advanced set up the advanced form setup that I showed you I remember we mentioned you know menu tabs for the views so that's what those are we can go throughout these different tabs and we're not gonna have anything active right because we don't have anything going on yet now so looking at this forms are actually based on taxonomy so if we scroll up here we look at structure taxonomy you'll see that we have the forms vocabulary and with that that's what's going to control our actual forms so if we want to structure you'll see we have forms here we can add a container container is actually this this forms thing this is a container so if we add another container we would have a separate actual section so let's go ahead and do that and I'll show you what I mean so we're going to add a container this container is going to be PHP so we're going to have a general new discussion on PHP rights real leave it as the root and we'll go ahead and hit save right and so we have a container add forms let's go ahead and add form within PHP we call this I don't know issues alright so issues for related to PHP and our parent is going to actually be PHP so go ahead and save right so now when we go to our form you'll see we still have forms but now we have PHP and we have the issues form within PHP right so that's what we've gone ahead and we've created if we looked at our taxonomy form we want to check out the terms there you'll see we have general discussion PHP and issues right so that's how that works so that's pretty much the advanced form module if you wanted to get crazy and do some customization you can go to views and you can see all the specific views that the advanced form module provides you so you see here advanced form module comes with a bunch of different views specifically you know advanced form active topics topic list new topics unanswered these are all those tabs that we saw at the beginning if you wanted to go even crazier and created your own tab you know maybe for a specific let's say user role if you know you had some I don't know special users on your site you just want to see specifically what they're talking about you go ahead and create that and add that as the menu itself so that's the advanced form module I really in a nutshell it's pretty basic pretty standard to use right into the box but it definitely makes your forms a little bit nicer so let's go ahead and we'll check out the the author pane so let's going to add some blocks or no structure blocks and then if we scroll down here you see we have the author pane you're going to go ahead and we're going to put that in the content first and we'll save that so with that saved if you scroll down we're going to go to actual configure and we got to choose which node types very short on so we're only going to show it on forum topic and we use the thumbnail for the picture preset I actually don't have a user picture set up but you'd want to use that if you're going to use your your user images so with that saved so with that saved let's go to our actual forums and we'll go into our general discussion here we're going to have a new new topic so new topic how great are these tutorials looking for some feedback on these tutorials what do the people think right so we go ahead and get save so there we go so you'll see here on the left we have the author information my actual name the fact that I'm online when I was last seen and when I joined the site right so that's the author page again pretty neat so if we switched over to our other user here right so they see specifically who started this and kind of what's going on right pretty neat again it's just something that takes your forms to the next level adds a little bit more functionality and if I had an image here you'd see that image as well that's well that's it that's the advanced form module that's the author pane I hope this helps out I know when I was first starting to use forums it's not that they're too tough it's just that there's a number of different things kind of going on and it can be tricky kind of getting them under your belt at a at the start so hope this helps if you have any questions please as always leave a comment on Toronto website developer comm I know some people have been using the YouTube comments at other sites it's just tough for me to me monitor all those different sites so if you have any questions please come to my site the comments are ready to go I have been getting a lot of spam comments so I've been deleting those so if I mistakenly delete yours please just shoot me an email let me know but other than that you know we'll see you soon into the next video tutorial thanks very much for watching

Channel: Web Development Tutorials

Views: 33,503

Rating: 4.9029126 out of 5

Keywords: drupal, drupal forums, advanced forum module, drupal video tutorial

Id: V5SUPVOCR1c

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2012