Hello,
just recently we started with the migration from Drupal 7 to 8 for the Molflow project.
I’m kind of overwhelmed with the new forum. Previously the forum was quite basic but easy to setup, the new forum is missing a lot of the basic functionality.
I suppose I have to play around with “Views” and the like somewhere.
Just for quick reference.
The old forum (click here) had proper icons for new posts etc and a basic grid layout. It doesn’t look pleasant, is missing a lot of features, but it was usable.
The new forum (click here) gives just a basic view of subforums, the structure (from forum to the comments) is pretty much accessible for the average user.
What is the usual advised way to engage with other users? Are there CERN supported Drupal modules other than “forum”?
I don’t have much experience with Drupal 8 forum, probably others can share their experience.
But from WebServices, we are now suggesting people to move any forum to Discourse service, and just link to the forum on the websites. See as example entice.web.cern.ch that used to have the forum directly on Drupal.
For small forums maybe it’s a bit overkill unless the forum is also merged with other ones on the same group/section/project etc.
To contribute in the discussion, one idea could be to separate the content from the forum. It is true that the D8 forum module is not so easily managed and themed and also I noticed that your Drupal site has content (articles). So in total what you can do:
Migrate the content of your D7 website to D8
Create a Discourse forum
Export the forum posts from the D8 website and try to import them in Discourse, so that you will not lose your old forum posts. However this could be a bit trickier and you will have to investigate how to import comments etc. If someone has done it before, it would be helpful.