Display 'x' characters of text beneath discussion title?

russlipton

I am looking forward to a standard extension(s) to support bloggish forums (cf Mr. K's stuff). Would there be any value to an extension that allowed admins to specify that 'x' characters of the text of the first item of a new discussion could be displayed under the discussion's title?

For example, this discussion might have looked like this (with the first 50 characters specified):

Display 'x' characters of text beneath discussion title?
... I am looking forward to a standard extension(s) to support bloggish forums (cf Mr. K's stuff). Would there be any value to an extension that allowed admins to specify that 'x' characters of the text of the first item of a new discussion could be displayed under the discussion's title? ...

This could be of value broadly since titles (even categories) are sometimes not very well-chosen. Even better, allow users to turn this on-or-off and specify number of characters computed for display?

Alas, I am not up to the task of writing extensions at this point. I would be grateful if someone took this on ... assuming it doesn't already exist or create some problems I have overlooked.

WallPhone

You should get in touch with ninjascience, he is trying to achieve the same result: http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/2960/

ninjascience

I've paused development of this extension. Partly because I have a mostly working site in CF that does what I need. I just need to finish it, and partly because Swell may help here. I'm not trying to make a blog extension for Vanilla, but I do want to display content from other blogs, and there's a chance the Swell may be better configured to extend than Vanilla for this.

Minisweeper

I dont mean to disappoint you but i really wouldnt be relying on a release of swell. I dont think I'm being pessimistic when I say I'm 99% certain it wont be released for at least a year.

takai

Do you mean for there to be an additional field on the new discussion page to manually put this text in.. Or for it to automatically fetch the text from your post?

mary

Or for it to automatically fetch the text from your post?

As I understand it, yes, that's what he wants; an auto-excerpt, of sorts:

...allowed admins to specify that 'x' characters of the text of the first item of a new discussion could be displayed under the discussion's title?

ninjascience

well, whether or not Swell comes out, I do plan on doing this eventually. I'd like to share my aggreagator code with folks after it's done, and CF isn't the best language to do that in. CF has a very thriving developer community with lots of great OS projects, but the folks how use them tend to be other CF developers, where in PHP OS projects, just about anybody can get them up and running on a most web hosts.

Another issue for me was trying to get the extension done elegantly, i.e. not using the ObjectFactory and not using an exension that relies on a seperate theme. I don't want to write something that has dependencies on other extensions or could break other extensions.

mary

Not using the ObjectFactory? Er... why?

Edit: never mind, found it.

russlipton

...allowed admins to specify that 'x' characters of the text of the first item of a new discussion could be displayed under the discussion's title?

I would amend that to say 'allowed admins or users to specify' ...

I'm sure there is a great reason for this but I am wondering for the first time why this never became a routine feature of forum software? This is a serious question; does anyone have some ideas?

I can think of thousands of times (literally) where I have clicked a thread title whose leading content proved misleading or simply uninteresting. If I could have viewed 50 or 100 or even 150 characters of all FIRST forum thread entries at my option, I would have been a happier camper.

I guess I'm saying that the more I consider this, the more it seems like a no-brainer killer feature for all forum software - really a core feature. What am I missing re: design, interface, coding or performance?

Minisweeper

Here's a couple of reasons (whether you deem them valid or not) why i believe it hasnt become routine: Extra database load = longer page loading times = slower software More 'clutter' on the main page of the forum / lots of text = can put people off It puts people off actually going into the thread to read it (it works the other way though, too) There are some forums out there who do it though. And it would be a neat extension.

ninjascience

And my whole purpose is to present Vanilla as a set of blog posts rather than a forum. Think of it as a blog with enhanced commenting features :-)

russlipton

ninjascience ... pretty please quick. Or Mr. K ..

Still being a tire-kicker and beginner, does anyone know whether the code for the Add-On's page can be inspected and used or factored into an add-on itself? That is very similar to what I am looking for, excepting ratings.

(The Add-On's page illustrates for me why the feature is so valuable to head up forum threads. Being able to scan an excerpt of the author's description of their add-on is a big win in intelligbility and efficiency for me as a user).

Toivo

bloggish forums? hahaa

Toivo

I guess you could just put together Feedreader and PageManager. So you could create another tab on your forum, put some feed on it that takes input from the same forum (like search a user, keyword or category). I guess you could even use different css for this page. Looks bloggish enough. Havent tried it myself (yet)

strawberries

or integrate the excellent open source, Nucleus, with vanilla....that is what I am in the middle of doing eg www.love2escape.com/multitrackers

russlipton

Toivo - thanks for the suggestion; interesting. Keep in mind that my feature or extension request is (of course) more general and not really about creating a blog. Nevertheless, I will definitely experiment while waiting and hoping. With this small (?) feature, I wouldn't need a blog nor, I suspect would many others.

russlipton

Two months on ...

Any hackers with a desire (need?) for this yet? I can see the trade-offs raised but still feel, on balance, it would be super-cool useful. In fact, it seems like the kind of thing that would leverage entirely new possibilities for congruent Vanilla apps. Given the smarts of the hackers here, I must be missing a large downside. Alas, I can read and tinker with PhP but not code without blowing myself up and anyone in proximity. Real Soon Now.

I am not thinking of the add-on as simulating a blog, though an admin could fool with CSS and specify a full display of the first post to a discussion. Instead, I would choose just enough characters to serve as a come-on to read the posts (100? 200?).

@Minisweeper: Would be way nicer still if users could choose for themselves. Intrusive? Off. Short excerpts - choose 100 characters. Entire content of first post for all displayed discussions? The reader pays the usability price (well, the server does ;-) for page load nastiness.

It's true this would also discourage (as well as encourage) click-through; probably a wash. However, my ordinary-person communities have so little online time that they would appreciate the implied filtering. I suspect it would encourage first posts to be crisper about the subject too; at least at the top of the post.

@mary - yes, exactly like an auto-excerpt.

SlashedZero

Something like lansmash.com would be actually great. With an option to use this display for specific categories, and eventually a choice of maximum characters.

russlipton

Lansmash is cool - who designed it, eh? Howww .... ?

SlashedZero

It's Steve. I contacted him a few weeks ago because I really liked his design, and he's planning to release it as an extension. Problem is he seems to be pretty busy at the moment. He told me last week he'd try to manage it this weekend, and since we're now at the beginning of the new week, all we can do is wait and see... He has several improvements to do before releasing it because most his system is currently hard-coded, so it's difficult to tell how much time it will take.

Not long, I hope

russlipton

Neato. It's apples-to-oranges to my specific request for excerpting the first post of every discussion but cool in its own write. Still hoping for that extension too. I'll drop him a line and ask him to weigh in on the implementation tradeoffs of a generalized solution even if he won't want to do it himself.