Giving someone with "edit" priviledges in a category the ability to change display of post order

DoyceT

Hi all,

I'm running 2.1.8, with a hacky sort of plugin that forces the forum to sort discussion posts by order created, rather than order updated. See near the end of this: http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/27892/need-to-sort-discussions-by-date-created-not-most-recent-comment/p2

The reasons for this are... well, a bit dumb, but it boils down to faculty who want their material presented in a specific order.

Now of course, even with this implemented, they screw things up and post their material in the wrong order, and then wail that they have to delete posts and start over.

At my boss's request, I'm trying to determine if there's a way to give someone the ability to drag posts into a different display order - basically the same way you can drag categories around on the dashboard, but with post order inside a specific forum, and tied to their user's "edit" permissions.

I'm ENTIRELY okay if the group consensus is "No, that's impossible/stupid/stupidly impossible/pick three."

Thanks in advance for any thoughts you have on this.

(Unrelated note: I recently created a second Vanilla forum for a literary agency - something to let authors and agents talk to each other, privately - with something like only 2 user roles and 4 categories - using Vanilla as it's actually intended, in other words, and it is GLORIOUS. So easy.)

hgtonight

Hmmm... this could be done, but I don't like the idea of doing it.

The drag'n'drop functionality vanilla uses is just a jquery plugin which you can read about here: http://jqueryui.com/sortable/

The trick is going to put attach sensible dates to your dateinserted field on the db.

DoyceT

Yeah. Given that I'm ordering the whole thing by dateinserted, reordering it with drag and drop seems... well, bad.

Okay... what if having "Edit" privileges in a sub-category allowed the display of an editable date field if you edit a discussion topic? That would let the faculty tweak the time posted until the posts showed up in the right order.

I'm sure NOTHING would go wrong with that.

Ugh. This discussion makes me feel slightly dirty, already.

Bleistivt

Or you go back to the normal sort, so they can bump their posts and delete the comments after that.

DoyceT

@Bleistivt said:
Or you go back to the normal sort, so they can bump their posts and delete the comments after that.

Most of these posts are meant to be (extensively) commented on by the students, so that won't work, because the posts would move around all willy-nilly and civilization would (as near as I can tell) end.

Not all faculty do their classes this way, but those that do are in the voting majority, and post many individual discussion topics each week, which apparently need to be worked through in a set order.

Suggesting to septuagenarians they present their material in a different way is an excellent way to get very long, huffy emails in my inbox. (Which is how I spent the other part of my morning. )

Bleistivt

This is kind of what categories were made for. But you would have to give them Dashboard.Manage permissions and it would further blow up your categories table.

DoyceT

Yeah. The head faculty guy was like "maybe we could just have permissions to make sub categories."

That would be a horror show. First, the idea of them using the dashboard... there is not enough 'no' in the universe.

Second, as you mentioned, we have already run into problems with too many sub-categories. We really need to simplify the structure, and this would make it worse.

whu606

Not answering your specific question, but s there a reason that all the threads have to be on the same forum?

Just wondering if you couldn't have a range of sub-forums, which might help spread the load?

DoyceT

For the purposes of federal certification (and student accessibility), yeah: the classes need to coexist in the same space, so the student have a single place to go for all their coursework.