Linking forums up with taxonomy

[Pooka]

One of my assistant admins wants a category system. Drupal has a beautiful category management system and I'm wondering about what would be involved in linking up that system with forums in vbulletin. I'm going to investigate and work on this myself - but I figured I would announce my intent in case someone was up to something similar.

What I envision is being able to assign a vocabulary to a forum just like you can attach a vocabulary to stories, pages and so on. I hope to do the call up within the plugin system of vb 3.5 without hacking. At most I might need to add a field on the forum and thread tables (each thread would belong to a category from among those in the vocubulary available for the forum).

Thoughts?

[tamarian]

I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this, but it has been requested frequently, so go for it :)

I have thought about it much, but I wonder if it's best to do it from the Drupal side, to avoid touching vB tables, or create a new table for the association, and that table can be 'JOIN'ed through the plugin code.

[Pooka]

Well, here's my thoughts (I need to study more of drupal before beginning this) -

a plugin at newthread_start can scan the drupal table looking for all vocabularies which list forumid - this means adding a forumid field to the table which stores the vocabularies. Once it has it it it creates the drop down menus for each category preferably using the same code that generates the code elswhere in drupal. Presumably I can gain access to this code by including the category module yes?

As to where to put the category information for a new thread - it can be done on a seperate drupal table or as a field on the thread table. I don't *think* creating a new field on the thread table will be a problem but at this point I'm open to either doing that or using a join approach using an all new table with fields threadid, categoryid, categorytitle (for rapid referencing during threadbit displays).

Do it right and some *quasi* forums based on categories could be created. I'll have to think on this some.