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Vanilla forum front page

veteranveteran
edited December 2005 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I really like your Vanilla forum but I haven't yet figured out the logic of your front page. Shouldn't users be brought right to the category page where they can then choose which forums to enter and discussions to view. It makes no sense to display to users every discussion that's going on in every forum, particulary once a site gets large and has many forums.

Comments

  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    You can switch it so that the categories page is first if you want (you can do just about any configuration you want like that with Vanilla). Personally, I don't like having discussions hidden behind categories - which is why it appears this way by default. I understand what you are saying, but just try this for a while and then see if you still don't like it.
  • veteranveteran
    I'm glad it is optional. However, to be fair I will try it with discussion first. Like I said, on a small site, especially one dedicated to one topic, discussions first may work well. But on a general purpose site with dozens of different topics, it would lose its effectiveness. Can you image users coming to the discussion pages and seeing threads for auto repairs, then sex, then politics and Alien abduction.
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    I must say that'd be the wierdest forum i'd ever come across. i <3 discussion view.
  • skyfexskyfex
    veteran: In my experience that's not true. I'm on a vBulletin forum (norwegian, sorry), that has the 10 latest discussion on the front page, and the option to view every updated discussion since you last checked. It works for all subforums (and it's a lot of topics, computers, music, pyrotechnics, design, mac, windows, unix, programming, blackhat, movies, politics..), and it's the best way to browse the forum I feel. It's not hard to ignore the topics you're not interested in. The best would be if you could have a front page with just the categories you want. I guess you could bookmark a saved search, but it's not entirely the same. How about it mark? =P
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    skyfex: You can do that now. Go to the categories page and block categories you don't want to see.
  • veteranveteran
    skyfex: That may be true but Vbulletin is easier to figure out since it is formatted and layed out like most conventional forums on the market. Having just reviewed over 100 forum scripts in the market, I was perplexed when I came across Vanilla forum. Right off the bat, I liked it but was left a little confused by the format. However, since that can be changed, I don't see that as a problem. I will continue to try out this new method for the next week or two.
  • skyfexskyfex
    mark: Hey, you're right. I guess Vanilla is perfect, huh? I was afraid it might block it from search or something too. But it doesn't. Genious!
  • PRSop2000PRSop2000
    How do you change it so Categories are first?
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Interesting question. I'm sure it's there somewhere but i cant quite see where either.
  • skyfexskyfex
    You can use the Page Manager extension (though I had problems getting it to work) .. or change it manually in appg/init_internal.php.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    Yeah, sorry. I keep forgetting that most people aren't using 0.9.3. In 0.9.3 it is a configuration option. In 0.9.2 it was a little more difficult.
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Where is it a configuration option? I couldnt find it. *hangs head.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    edited December 2005
    The tabs are set based on an index. The default indexes can be found in the appg/settings.php file:

    // Vanilla Tab Positions $Configuration["TAB_POSITION_DISCUSSIONS"] = "10"; $Configuration["TAB_POSITION_CATEGORIES"] = "20"; $Configuration["TAB_POSITION_SEARCH"] = "30"; $Configuration["TAB_POSITION_SETTINGS"] = "40"; $Configuration["TAB_POSITION_ACCOUNT"] = "50";

    So, the first thing to do would be to change the TAB_POSITION_CATEGORIES to something like 5 in the conf/settings.php file.

    Up next you've got to make the user get forwarded to the category page instead of the discussion page when they sign in. You can do that with this configuration option:

    $Configuration["FORWARD_VALIDATED_USER_URL"] = "./";

    Just change that to point to ./categories.php in your conf/settings.php and you're done.
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Oh. And there was me thinking you made this easy :P
This discussion has been closed.