Showing discussions in groups of categories

judgej

Categories can be grouped under "parent" categories, which is a handy thing to be able to do to help with organisation of categories.

However, that grouping appears to be used only by the categories module that is displayed in the sidebar, and does not go any deeper than this presentational aspect. For a user you have two options for displaying categories: all of them, or just one.

What I would like to be able to do, is display (and fetch through RSS) all the discussions under a given parent category. That means all discussions for categories that I have permission to see, that share the same parent category. Looking through the code, it seems that this would be an involved change, because the code is pretty much locked down to "all categories or just one" at many levels (I was hoping it was a simple change).

Is this something that anyone has created a plugin for, or has any plans to change?

-- Jason

tmilovan

I was planning to make a plugin where you would be able to choose a set of categories for filtering discussions list. For example I have a forum where I would like to split iPhone themed categories and Mac themed categories. So users that don't want to follow one of them can choose for example Mac forum link and get only the Mac related posts.

My intention was to enable users to make as many category groups they wanted and to make them accessible with urls like:
/discussions-group1_name
/discussions-group2_name
/discussions-group3_name

Display would be the same as normal discussions list but only with threads from selected categories.

unfortunately I dont have time to learn enough about Vannila yet, so it's on my someday/maybe to do list.

judgej

Yes, that sounds like a step even further than I am looking for. Creating the front-end controller for this would probably be quite easy to do. The next layer down - the discussion model - is where it becomes a little harder, because the code is written in such a way as to assume this is never something that would ever be wanted - its needs a little refactoring, methinks, to open all these possibilities.