How to create a completely new view of the messages?

woll

What would the best way to create a completely new view of the messages in a forum (a view that is not supported as standard by Vanilla)?

e.g. If I wanted to show a hierarchical list of the most recent N threads, and for each message in each thread list the message title, date and poster's name - Something like this:
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Thread-1-title Poster date
....Title-of-2nd-message-in-thread-1 Poster date
....Title-of-3rd-message-in-thread-1 Poster date
Thread-2-title Poster date
....Title-of-2nd-message-in-thread-2 Poster date
....Title-of-3rd-message-in-thread-2 Poster date
Thread-3-title Poster date
....Title-of-2nd-message-in-thread-3 Poster date
....Title-of-3rd-message-in-thread-3 Poster date


-----------

The exact details and how to extract and display those fields is not important at the moment, but what would be the best way of creating such views that are not supported as standard by Vanilla?

I would like to create a few of these new views (that exist in the forum software I am currently using) and present them as options to the users, as well as displaying the more normal standard message view. As well as the standard Vanilla "Discussions" view, there would be these other views as options.

Thanks,
Woll

Mark

The difficult part is that it requires a custom query to get the data you want. So, you could do it with a plugin. You can add a method to the plugin controller, query the data you need, and then create a related view to display the data.