Order RSS by most recent Discussion date (not most recent comment date)?

gharald

I linked up [myforumurl]/discussions/feed.rss to feedburner. Users are confused. Vanilla is ordering the feeds by latest COMMENT date, not latest discussion date. In other words, a discussion from 2 years ago is showing up as the "latest" discussion simply because someone commented on it today.

I checked out the raw RSS feed in my browser and the same issue comes up - the top discussions in the feed are not the newest discussions.

Is there any way to change the behavior of feed.rss so it behaves more like a traditional RSS feed -- showing the latest discussions first?

gharald

I also tried http://www.mysite.com/discussions.xml/1-10/ but the behavior is the same (shows old discussions as "latest" discussions)

hgtonight

You are looking to change the sort field, check out this discussion here: http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/180112/#Comment_180112

Let me know if that works for you.

gharald

@hgtonight I did indeed see your post before and it worked. The problem is, that threw off the whole site, so every category was ordered by date discussion was inserted. I am just looking for a way to have a feed ordered by date discussion inserted.

gharald

Maybe there is a feed parser out there that is smarter than feedburner. But feedburner can't figure it out based on the feed provided.

hgtonight

This is somewhat of a pickle. You would want to hook into the discussion model to change the sort, but the controller is what knows what the delivery method is.

I don't have a codebase in front of me at the moment, so I can't really help.

gharald

I think the bigger problem here is that the users are expecting a front page that lists the discussions by the date the discussion was inserted, not the default Vanilla behavior (date the last comment was inserted). I suspect the best way to fix this is write a custom function that is based off of the Vanilla "discussion model" and then call that function on a new page?

hgtonight

@gharald said:
I think the bigger problem here is that the users are expecting a front page that lists the discussions by the date the discussion was inserted, not the default Vanilla behavior (date the last comment was inserted).

I don't really care when someone started a discussion, just when the last person was talking about it. If you want to sort the discussion list site wide, follow the previous link. If you want just a feed that is sorted this way, you can hook in and do that via a plugin.

gharald

@hgtonight said:
I don't really care when someone started a discussion, just when the last person was talking about it.

We have two classes of users: those who think like you do, and those who are perhaps more casual users and are bewildered that they no longer have a blog-like front page that lists the discussions chronologically. So that's why we do not want the whole site to be sorted that way.

If I was to write a plugin to create a blog-like front page (which is a bit beyond my current abilities, at least as of today) is there a good starting point you could recommend? Would I take an existing function and rewrite it?

I did try the "Nillablog" plugin, but that plugin only allows you to pick categories that you want to display in "blog-like" fashion. I suppose there is maybe a way to hack it...

hgtonight

If you are looking for a blog application, I highly suggest checking out @Shadowdare‌'s Articles application proposal. I personally started using NillaBlog but ended up writing my own that does some nice stuff with the modules. I didn't release it because I think it is a little rough, but it is called BlanderBlog and you can find it on my GitHub.

If you want to create a new "view" like discussions/bydate that would be pretty easy to do via a plugin. This hook will temporarily override the configured sort field and direction:

public function DiscussionsController_ByDate_Create($Sender) {
  // Get a copy of the configuration object and temporarily override the sort options
  $Config = Gdn::Config();
  $Config->Set('Vanilla.Discussions.SortField', 'd.DateInserted', TRUE, FALSE);
  $Config->Set('Vanilla.Discussions.SortDirection', 'desc', TRUE, FALSE);

  // Do everything else the same as the index method
  $Sender->View = 'index';
  $Sender->Index();
}

Not sure where to put this? Add it to your theme hooks file, or create a simple plugin to put it in.

gharald

omigosh, it's like magic! Thank you. Vanilla is so powerful... yet so mysterious. @hgtonight I hope one day I have your ninja skills.