Page rights and management had no effect on discussions.php

Andos

In an attempt to remove the 'Discussions' tab to make my Vanilla installation more 'normal' forum like, I edited the page access priveleges so no one could access the discussions.php page. But it didnt work. You can still see the discussions page but it did remove the tab to them. So to completely prevent the user from ever seing the discussions page I had to make a new template and add code to redirect to categories.php id no querystring was present. I am puzzled why there are no way to "turn off" that default discussions page. In other forums its more called an 'active thread list'. I don't se why Vanilla should "force" the users to have it without editing the php.

Wanderer

Hey Andos, have you tried the Page Management extension?

Minisweeper

Page Manager should do it, but I'm just curious why it's otherwise alright for other forums out there to 'force' users to have the categories page without editing the php...

Andos

I allready use the Page Management extension and it works ok. But I just find it odd that there is no way for us to change the default page you enter when opening up the vanilla forums. For my forum I would like to have the categories the default page and just have the 'discussions' page as an optional 'Active topics' page instead. That doesn't seem to be possible with Vanilla.

Wanderer

Andos, I have a feeling that you can set the initial page to Categories by changing these lines in index.php...
$Head->BodyId = 'DiscussionsPage'; $Menu->CurrentTab = 'discussions'; $Panel->CssClass = 'DiscussionPanel'; $Panel->BodyCssClass = 'Discussions';
...do a backup of index.php first!

Mark

Change or add this setting in your conf/settings.php to be what you want them to be sent to by default:

$Configuration['FORWARD_VALIDATED_USER_URL'] = '/url/to/your/categories.php';

Change or add these values to your conf/settings.php:

$Configuration['TAB_POSITION_DISCUSSIONS'] = '20'; $Configuration['TAB_POSITION_CATEGORIES'] = '10';

Andos

Wanderer: I don't feel like editing the index.php file as it gets overwritten when I update so another approach would be prefered. Mark: I tried to do exactly what you said but it had no effect at all. Copying discussions.php to my own theme folder and adding this PHP at the top: if( !$_GET["CategoryID"] ) { header("Location: categories.php"); exit; } works like a charm. Are you sure there are no better approach?

Wanderer

Andos, I think you'll find this breaks the Discussions tab!

Andos

In my previous post I wrote that I wanted to completely hide it ;) So in this case it wouldn't matter much. Well I would maybe like to add it later. But the methods for using the categories as the default page didn't seem to work so I have to use my method until I find a way :)