Integrating Phorum with Drupal

Phorum and Drupal are two of my favourite open source software packages. Phorum is in my opinion the best of the many PHP-based standalone forum products, while Drupal is my favoured CMS.

Drupal is not without its headaches, and one of them is its own built in forum, which is not very flexible. It also fails to work at all if you install certain Drupal add-ons. This was my position in the middle of last week: having committed to providing forum functionality for a site, but unable to get it working.

Since I am comfortable with Phorum my immediate thought was to look for a way of integrating it and fortunately most of the work had already been done by Maurice Makaay, one of the most energetic contributors to the development of Phorum. He’d written a piece of code which makes it possible to embed Phorum inside other applications, so all I needed to do was to supply the appropriate wrapper for Drupal, which took about a day and a half’s work.

The phorum integration code is now available as a Drupal module. I hope some other folk will find it useful.