In my warped (or creative) sense of thinking, the handling of this could be another benefit of adding a tag field to each discussion (and perhaps comment).
Sorry if this is an old thread but I'm new to the Vanilla community and think this would be a great addition to Vanilla. Any word on whether something like this will be implemented?
Couldn't you use the Sticky feature to keep certain Discussions at the top? But I guess you are looking more for something like the sitepoint site where they have Editor's Choices or on the forum where they have Highlited Forum Discussions. I think the easiest thing would be to put something in the sidepanel using a special Category like Featured (would look like the Editor's Choices).
I had some time today today to look into a solution for this. The simplest one is to modify the Latest Topic add-on. You will need to add a category that this extension will display discussions from. I added a variable to do this: global $FeaturedCategory;
$FeaturedCategory = 1; // change this to show the Featured Category I modified the mysql statement to only get the $FeaturedCategory that you will add to your forum. Then I had to add a call to the Comment table to get the Comment so that I could display 40 characters of it so that the user has an idea of what the discussion is all about. You could lengthen that if you want.
Here is what the IF statement should look like: if(in_array($Context->SelfUrl, array("index.php", "categories.php", "discussions.php", "comments.php", "search.php", "post.php", "account.php", "settings.php"))){
$Panel->AddList($title, 0);
$result=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM ".$Configuration['DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX']."Discussion WHERE CategoryID=$FeaturedCategory AND active='1' $closed ORDER BY DiscussionID DESC LIMIT $num; ");
while($r=mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$name=$r['Name'];
$id=$r['DiscussionID'];
// get comment body
$resultc = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM ".$Configuration['DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX']."Comment WHERE DiscussionID=$id ORDER BY CommentID DESC LIMIT 1; ");
$rows = $Context->Database->GetRow($resultc);
$cdesc = substr($rows[7], 0, 40);
$Panel->AddListItem($title, $name.'-'.$cdesc, $Configuration['BASE_URL']."comments.php?DiscussionID=".$id."&page=1");
}
} This adds a section to the side panel.
I always imagined a "Feature this discussion" option in the side panel right above "Make this discussion sticky". Featured discussions get flagged with a [Featured] tag and are shown on their own Features page in the order that they were featured.
You could include a display script for the Features page that blends with the default theme and have the extension check the theme directory for an override, the way SetList does. I imagine you would only see the first paragraph of each feature with a "More..." link that takes you to the actual discussion. Let the user set how many features are displayed per page.
Now install Page Manager and make the Features page the front page of your site, and presto you have an instant collaborative blog.
At least, that's how I always imagined it.
Comments
global $FeaturedCategory; $FeaturedCategory = 1; // change this to show the Featured CategoryI modified the mysql statement to only get the $FeaturedCategory that you will add to your forum. Then I had to add a call to the Comment table to get the Comment so that I could display 40 characters of it so that the user has an idea of what the discussion is all about. You could lengthen that if you want.
Here is what the IF statement should look like:
if(in_array($Context->SelfUrl, array("index.php", "categories.php", "discussions.php", "comments.php", "search.php", "post.php", "account.php", "settings.php"))){ $Panel->AddList($title, 0); $result=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM ".$Configuration['DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX']."Discussion WHERE CategoryID=$FeaturedCategory AND active='1' $closed ORDER BY DiscussionID DESC LIMIT $num; "); while($r=mysql_fetch_array($result)){ $name=$r['Name']; $id=$r['DiscussionID']; // get comment body $resultc = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM ".$Configuration['DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX']."Comment WHERE DiscussionID=$id ORDER BY CommentID DESC LIMIT 1; "); $rows = $Context->Database->GetRow($resultc); $cdesc = substr($rows[7], 0, 40); $Panel->AddListItem($title, $name.'-'.$cdesc, $Configuration['BASE_URL']."comments.php?DiscussionID=".$id."&page=1"); } }This adds a section to the side panel.