Getting Started

The Drupal installation isn't really any different than other uses, so I won't detail that here.  You DO need to make sure you enabled the forum module in the Drupal core (and any other modules that you might need, such as upload, profile, search, poll, tracker, etc.)

Gather Required Modules

Please note that not all of these modules may be necessary for your site.  In fact, you can just enable the forum module and go with that!  I'm attempting to detail my process here to help others (and to help myself if I ever need to reinstall.)

The following is a list of modules that I added to get the forum working the way I needed:

• phpBB2Drupal (absolutely necessary for migrating from phpBB, but otherwise you probably won't need it.)
• BBCode (allows using BBCode for text markup.  Common in a lot of forums, so it's a good idea to have.)
• Privatemsg (needed so users can send private messages.  phpBB2Drupal uses this to convert phpBB PMs.)
• phpass (stores passwords securely.  Needed by phpBB2Drupal, but make sure to read over the project page!)
• Comment Upload (allows attachments to be included with comments.)
• Better Formats (Drupal doesn't natively allow an input format to be used for just one content type.  This fixes that since you might not want your forum type to be used for blogs, or tutorials... then again maybe you do.)

The following improve the forum experience:

• Advanced Forum (gives the Drupal forum a look closer to other, more common forums.)
• Author Pane (provides a block of information about the author.  Required by Advanced Forum.)
• Flatcomments (forces comments to always reply to the node regardless of the reply link used to post the comment.  Required by Advanced Forum.)
• Forum Access (allows forums to be set to private.  This may be included in the core of Drupal 7.)
• ACL (required by Forum Access.)
• Signatures for Forums (allows signatures to be placed in the posts.  If a user changes their signature, all posts will be updated.)
• Smileys (converts ASCII emoticons to graphical smilies.)
• Fasttoggle (provides links for moderators to directly change post settings.)

Clean Up

Install Advanced Forum

If you look at your forum now, it really doesn't look all that impressive.  If you have users who are used to your phpBB forum, they are going to start emailing you nasty messages about how they hate the new look and all that.  Let's try to make things a bit easier for us all.

First up, let's install the following modules:

• Author Pane
• Flat Comments
• Advanced Forum

Upon installation of the Flat Comments module, you will be able to flatten existing comments for any and all types.  I prefer flat comments, but suit yourself.  I do think forums look better with flat comments as it is easier to find the most recent post.

Go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Advanced Forum.  I don't like the 'naked' forum style, so change it to something else (blue_lagoon_stacked is nice.)  The rest can be left alone unless you really want to change it.

Now if you look at your imported forum, it is starting to look like a forum!  You may notice that the user avatars and smilies are not showing and the signatures aren't quite right.  We'll get to that, but first let's tackle...

Private Forums

It is pretty common for a forum to be accessible only to moderators or those with sufficiently high enough status.  Drupal currently doesn't support this behavior natively, but is expected to in D7.  In the meantime, we need the following modules installed:

• ACL
• Forum Access

You will need to rebuild the content permissions.  Now to set a forum for a special group of members, go to Administer -> Content Management -> Forums.  Select 'edit forum' next to the forum you wish to make private and select the appropriate permissions at the bottom.  For example, make the moderator the only one who can view a forum.  You might want to adjust the other permissions as well so that the appropriate individuals may edit or delete posts.

Smilies

In order to convert ASCII emoticons to graphical smilies, you need to install the Smileys module.  You may import smilies from other applications, such as phpBB or Yahoo!  In order to have them work with your Forum input format, go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Input Formats and configure the forum format by enabling the Smileys filter.  Also, go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Smileys and under Settings, enable smileys for nodes and comments and all desired format types (at least your forum type.)  You might want to go ahead and enable this for other formats as well.  If you look at your forum posts, you should have smilies working!

Signatures

By default, Drupal appends the signature to the end of the post.  In order handle this properly (meaning, like other forums), install the Signatures for Forums module.  Go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Signatures for Forums and adjust the settings (show the signatures for the desired format types, I use the forum input format...)  Next, Drupal's signature functionality must be turned on, so go to Administer -> User Management -> User Settings and make sure signature support is enabled (we did this earlier.)  Since we are also using Advanced Forum, go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Signatures for Forums and expand 'Other Options' and disable 'Automatically add signatures to content.'

Fix User Avatars

Users created in Drupal should have no problem with their avatars showing up.  However, I was going crazy trying to get the avatars for users imported from phpBB to show up.  After some digging through the databases and looking at the files in the phpBB images/avatar/upload directory, I figured it out.  Say you have a file in the directory named 63f0ff6ffa05cdd65149165723a8afd8_10.jpg.  The 63f0ff6ffa05cdd65149165723a8afd8_ is some sort of hash used by phpBB for reasons I can't understand.  If you dig into the database, you will find that the user with the avatar has the filename as simply 10.jpg in the database.  I used Bulk Rename Utility to remove everything up to and including the underscore in the files.  This worked for the majority of the avatars, but there were some still not showing.  More digging in the database showed that after this initial rename process, I had some files with names like 4_234576465234.jpeg in the database which should be associated with a file named 4.jpeg.  You can find these files by searching the drupal_users table for where the picture value is "like" '%\_%' (notice the escaped underscore and wildcards).  Since there were only a few, I manually editted the database to remove the underscore and gibberish after.  I have no idea why phpBB did this, but it did.  However, we still aren't finished, as the forum still won't show the avatars!  Again, looking at the path for the avatar, we can see that phpBB2Drupal has them in the database as being in the directory 'files/' when they should be in 'sites/default/files/'.  Use the following SQL command on the users table (in my case, drupal_users) by going to that table in phpMyAdmin and clicking the SQL tab.

UPDATE drupal_users SET picture = REPLACE(picture, "files/", "sites/default/files/")

followed by

UPDATE drupal_users SET picture = REPLACE(picture, "sites/default/sites/default/", "sites/default/")

in order to remove any duplications.

(see this issue for how I figured this one out: http://drupal.org/node/689852).

At this point, you should be able to see the avatars in the forum!!!!

(By the way, the avatars from phpBB need to be copied to 'sites/default/files/pictures/'.  I then used IrfanView to resize them to the size used by the site/forum.)  In order to get the pictures to show at an appropriate size without physically resizing them (in other words, to have smaller pictures in the forum posts and larger pictures in the profile), use the ImageCache Profiles module.  Details can be found in the 'Miscellaneous Additions' part of this tutorial.

Just as we copied page.tpl.php to page-downloads.tpl.php, we need to do the same for the node.tpl.php file.  Actually, the modification is very minor and easy to miss.  In the first div, change the name of the class from "node" to "downloads-node".  In other words, change the line from

<div id="node-<?php print $node->nid; ?>" class="node<?php if ($sticky) { print ' sticky'; } ?><?php if (!$status) { print ' node-unpublished'; } ?>">

to

<div id="node-<?php print $node->nid; ?>" class="downloads-node downloads-node-<?php print $zebra; ?><?php if ($sticky) { print ' sticky'; } ?><?php if (!$status) { print ' node-unpublished'; } ?>">

 This will let us theme the body of the node. Note the

downloads-node-<?php print $zebra; ?>

in the modified line.  This will allow you to alternate the background colors of even/odd nodes if you'd like.

Assuming we want to have the download manager accessible from the menu, we need to setup a view for the content type.  Go to Administer->Site Building->Views, and click "Add" at the top of the page.  Enter a name (ie. "downloads") and (optionally) a description ("Collection of files available for download") and a tag ("downloads") for this view.  Leave the type as "Node" and click "Next."

We now have a fairly complicated looking page.  Don't despair, we'll get through this.

On the left, under "Defaults," there is a drop-down box with some view displays.  Select "Page" and click "Add Display."  Repeat this for the block display type.  (Note: The block display is optional, but if you wanted, say, a sidebar that shows the most recent download files, you'll need this.)

Setup the Default Display

Select "Defaults" again.  Under "Basic Settings", change the title to "Downloads" or something more descriptive than the default.  You change the values by clicking the link, then editing the fields that appear at the bottom of the page.

We now need to add some things to different groups.  Do this by clicking the "+" box in the appropriate group.

Under "Sort Criteria," add "Node: Post Date" by clicking the "+", selecting the "Node" group, then checking the "Post Date" checkbox.  Click "Add," then set the sort order and granularity (I use descending, with second granularity.)  Click "Update" to finish.

Under "Filters," add "Node: Type" and "Node: Published."  Set "published" to true, so only those download files that have been published will be displayed, and leave it unexposed.  Make the type "Is one of" and "Download" (or whatever you named the content type.)

Now we add the fields we want displayed in the node.  This process is similar to the above, and you can add any fields you wish, but I'll just explain what I have.

1. Node: Title (remove the default label and check "Link this field to its node)
2. Node: Post Date (change the label and adjust the date format if desired)
3. Node: Updated Date (change the label and adjust the date format if desired)
4. Node: Body (remove the default label)
5. Content: Content: File Name (this is the File Name field we added to the content type) (Change the label to "None")
6. Content: Content: Preview Image (this is the preview image field we added to the content type) (Check "Link this field to its node," change label to "none," and set the format to "Image".)
7. Node: Comment Count (defaults are fine)
8. Taxonomy: All terms (remove default label)

Save the settings.

Setup the Page Display

Click "Page" in the left column to bring up the page settings.

Under "Page Settings", set the path to "downloads" so that you can access the downloads page by going to http://sitename.com/downloads.

Save the settings.

Menu Option 1

Set the menu to "Normal menu entry" and "Downloads" as the title and select which menu to add it to.  This will add a "Downloads" item to the menu, which will basically list all items, like a blog.  This is fine in some cases (for instance, a most recently added list) but not really categorized like we'd want.  Read option 2 for a nicer solution.

Save the settings.

Menu Option 2

Typically, we'd like to have our files organized by the taxonomy terms associated with them.  This is quite simple to do by using the "Taxonomy List" module.  Basically, all you need to do is create a new menu item (Administer->Site Building->Menus-><name_of_menu>) and click "Add Item."  Enter a title, which will appear on the menu, and in the path field, enter "taxonomy/vocabulary/<vid>," where <vid> is the id of the vocabulary ("Downloads") that we want to list.  In order to find the vocabulary id, go to Administer->Content Management->Taxonomy, and hover over the "edit vocabulary" link for the vocabulary we a looking for.  Notice the address of the link ends with a number (something like ..../taxonomy/edit/vocabulary/1, where 1 is the vocabulary id.)  You may set any of the other options for the menu (description, parent, etc.) that you like and save it.  Now when you click the menu item, you are taken to a page that has the taxonomy terms for the download files.  Click a term, and you have the files in that category.

You may want to configure the taxonomy list a bit.  Go to Administer->Site Configuration->Taxonomy List.  I set it to display 1 term per row, but that's up to you.  I do recommend checking the "Add edit term link" so you can edit the term's description when logged in as an administrator.  The reason for this is that we are letting users define new terms when a file is uploaded.  These new terms won't have a description (which is nice to have for the category) and by having the edit link here, it is easier to modify through casual browsing.

Save the settings.

Setup the Block Display

Under "Block Settings," change the "admin" to give the block a description name, such as "DownloadBlock."

Save the settings.