"Father" Categories

wlvrn

Hello, I'm new to Vanilla but I'm loving the experience so far. As I play around with it in an attempt to see if it would be good for an upcoming site I'm developing, I started to ask myself how hard it would be to create "father categories." Basically, the site I'm creating has a need for a couple hundred categories for sports TEAMS. While I know this might spread the community thin, it's really a necessary evil. The way I thought I might get around this would be to somehow hack Vanilla to assign some kind of father category to a post. So, while a post would be in the category "Soandso TEAM", it would be part of the father category "Soandso SPORT". This way, I could kind of dynamically create a larger discussion group (forum, category, whatever you'd like to call it) around the SPORT. Now, I'm fairly new so this might exist in some form already and I may have missed it but I figured I'd ask here in the chance that it is not. That being the case, how hard would it be to hack and slash this type of feature in? Thanks much!

Minisweeper

At present this is not possible. It could be, i'm sure, but it'd take quite a big extension i imagine. Would it not be easier to run seperate forums alongside each other?

wlvrn

I'm not sure. I'd be worried about how hard it would be to then tie them together and then into my site. The authentication tie-in alone makes me shudder (though I hear it will be easier in 0.9.3). I'm wondering how hard it would be to add a new table called "Father_Cat" or something. Then hack the post function to accept a FatherID. Then enter the PostID and FatherID into this new table. Then copy the category page but adjust the query to pull a list of IDs from the Father table... I'm not sure... but something along those lines. I'm really new to the code for Vanilla so I'm not sure how difficult something like this would be. I just need to pull posts across a multitude of Categories... this should be fun ;)

Minisweeper

Hmm.. What about if you made a second categories page which just ran some queries as the existing categories page does, but just stuck a couple of extra category ID's in the query? Or did you want a father cat page which would give you a list of categories which you'd then use as normal?

wlvrn

That sounds about right. How easy would it be to modify the LUM_Discussion table to have a secondary CategoryID? This second CategoryID would come from another Category table (lets call it Father). Then I modify the post function to populate it. Then I could query upon that... ?

Minisweeper

Lemme just get this straight. Do you want to be able to have posts available in 2 categories, or do you want to have a list of categories available under a bigger category?
i.e. People can either find a dicussion in two ways but you'll have loads of categories; or; because you have loads of categories, you use eg 10 father categories each of which have 100 sub categories and then you have the associated posts.

wlvrn

Yeah, let me clarify as I'm not sure I explained this well. (thanks for sticking around, by the way!) We cover sports. We need a way to have a category for each team so that people can talk about the team and not hear chatter about the entire league. So, for instance in NCAA football we need boards for all 119 division I-A teams. That's just NCAAFB; we cover both college AND pro sports. That's a lotta categories. Now, in having so many categories communication gets spread out quite a bit because the groups are so specialized. So, I was thinking that if I was able to "tag" a Discussion or Category with a "SPORTID" identifier, I would be able to query and create a fake "Sport Category". This way I could pull out and create this new super-category that was called, for instance, "NCAA Football" and inside would be all posts from groups that were tagged. This way, while the team pages would show targetted posts, the sports pages would be much larger. Call it, cross-marketting for discussion boards... I guess. Does that clarify it at all? Thanks again for the help.

lech

The 'GrandMother' -> Mother -> Child setup could be useful for those who want to REALLY REALLY break down forum categories in this aspect. It could be an extra useful feature for those who want to bust things up this far. Plus you could then flex those AJAX skills a bit further with expando category buttons and such

IE:

[Grandmother Categories list]
     |
     +--[ Mother of stuff 1 ] <unfolds children>
     |      |
     |      +-[child cat 1 ] <dumps you into normal thread view for this cat>
     |      |
     |      +-[child cat 2 ]
     |
     +--[ Mother of stuff 2 ]
     |      |
     |      +   ect..

Could be helpful in the longrun.

wlvrn

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'd love to have. How much customization are we talking about here? Should I wait for 0.9.3 before I roll up my sleeves and attempt this?

lech

That would depend if mark decides to toss it into the core, or allow a means to establish this kind of display via extension. Only time and mark can tell :D

sweatnine

Any updates with this? Really looking for sub categories here.

Linc

This is re: Vanilla 1. Vanilla 2 has support for sub categories, albeit not very robust.