All Categories 'within' categories

TownFish

Has anyone ever achieved this succesfully or written any plugins that can allow you to have an All Categories within Q&A so you can create nested categories within Q&A but view a single list containing all the posts across all the nested categories, and still have the discussion categories running separately under the main All categories?

I'd really like to be able to have an All Categories within a category.

hgtonight

All children categories?

I believe @R_J and @businessdad were working on something like that, but I can't find it right now.

businessdad

@hgtonight I think you are referring to this old post: http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/200186/#Comment_200186

hgtonight

It wasn't @R_J at all!

Thanks @businessdad

TownFish

Thanks @businessdad yes I had already seen and read that post and wasn't overly sure if this had been achieved yet and could be achieved without performance issues on the database as mentioned by @Linc ?

TownFish

The kind of category structure i'd like to adopt would look like this:

All Categories (Top Parent)
-London
- Q&A
- All Categories
- Nested/Sub Categories
- Disucssions
- All Categories
- Nested/Sub Categories

-Manchester
- Q&A
- All Categories
- Nested/Sub Categories
- Disucssions
- All Categories
- Nested/Sub Categories

businessdad

@TownFish The queries I posted won't kill any database. The other suggested methods, i.e. using the CategoryModel::GetSubtree(), will fire multiple queries, which are far less efficient on a standard self-hosted site. Lincoln mentioned that those methods "will use the cache, if available", but that is rarely the case with self-hosted Vanilla installations (hosted installations have a powerful caching system in place, not available to self-hosted).

Regarding the availability of a plugin that does what you are asking, I don't think there is one.

businessdad

Furthermore, with the limited amount of categories you have, as long as you will ensure that you don't fetch hundreds of thousands discussions and comments every time, performance will be ok.

Lincoln always has an eye on scaling and performance, but those concerns can often fall into the realm of premature optimisation.

TownFish

Thanks @businessdad, great news to hear it can be done, I think if we ever got big enough to be concerned about performance we would invest in a powerful caching system.

Do you think this is something I could pay you to do for my forum categories?

businessdad

That's a good approach. If you will suddenly find yourself with a million users and the site will become slow because of that code, it will be a wonderful problem to have. Most likely, you will see a slower growth, giving you plenty of time for performance tuning.

Regarding the project itself, I'm quite busy, but you can send me some more details and I will see if I can fit that project in the schedule.

TownFish

Just in addition to this, if we create 2 all categories lists one for Q&A and one for Discussions, is it then possible to have a seperate search for each list and a seperate sort by filter (ie hot posts, unread, mine, bookmarked, zero comments, etc)?

MrZia12

 I can't find it right now.