Looking for a solution concerning lack of a feature

Achithyn

Greetings all, I've been playing with Vanilla for the last few days and have learned tremendously. I really enjoy this program and will, more than likely, be using it for my new website I am current designing. I do, however, have one problem I could use your experience to work out. I run a creative writing community at www.arcane-artistry.org. I'm dropping this site in January and will be starting up a similar site for story writers only, called PPENN- www.ppenn.org. The problem: PPENN focusses on creative writing daily. We have interactive projects to help members want to write daily and to receive the help of other, more experienced writers. Well, one of our interactive writing projects is: CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure, more information here: http://www.arcane-artistry.org/cyoa.php ). I'm kind of stuck with how I will implement this style of writing on Vanilla. CYOA, to keep things as organized as possible, utilizes a new sub-forum for each story added. As we all know, Vanilla does not support sub-forums. At this point, it looks like my only options are A- have a large beehive of unorganized threads in one category or B- install two vanilla forums and share the database. One forum would be dedicated to CYOA and each category would be a new story. I don't really want to install a new forum just for this, though - so, any idea what I could do instead to keep things organized? This is how the forum is setup, currently for CYOA: http://www.arcane-artistry.org/forums/index.php?showforum=32 Thanks for your time and help! :) ~Achithyn

WallPhone

Part of me feels a wiki would be more appropriate, as the stories could be interlinked and branched a bit more natrually. Downside is potential for purposely/accidentally changing of another author's story.

But maybe a wiki could be useful to serve as the glue that links the stories together--say each wiki page gives the short story introduction and then outlines and links to each branch of the members story contributions. When a author contributes to a story, they must add their thread's link to the story's wiki page (or message an administrator with permissions to do so.)

davidh

I had a similar problem on one of my installs... the client had a forum with 4-5 nested levels of subforums attached. In the end, it was really just a paradigm shift, trying to figure out "do I really need a ton of different categories, with a ton of subcategories?" Your answer might be yes, in which case Vanilla won't easily work without modification. But I've found in most cases, I don't need sub-forums. General categories work best, and really have an extra benefit of forcing people into discussions they otherwise would not have found or navigated to. Looking at your forum, I would recommend using each current general forum you have, allowing all discussions to filter into those. To take care of the CYOA issue, I would simply create a new category for each CYOA. To distinguish it, you would simply have a "CYOA:" or "[CYOA]" before the description for each. And then, I would make usage of the Category Jumper (http://lussumo.com/addons/?PostBackAction=AddOn&AddOnID=4), which will allow for easy navigation to those particular categories. If you still feel you need subcategories, you make look at these previous discussions; the first talks about a hack to get subcategories, the second discusses using separate tabs for some categories: http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/3320/subcategories/#Item_0 http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/4348/split-category-display-aka-category-tabs-alternative-to-true-subcategories/#Item_8 Edit: I also like the idea of a wiki for this purpose, per the previous comment. You might even be able to integrate a wiki into it's own tab in your Vanilla forum, which would be a cool mod. A wiki's navigational structure is perfect for a CYOA.

Achithyn

Hey guys, Thanks for the suggestions. :) I really like the wiki idea. I originally, about a year ago, was going to start a wiki for this project, just because it seemed like it would work very well. However, I had problems skinning and, overall, using the software, so I gave up on it. Where I like wiki's (wikipedia.org for example), I don't really want to run my own. Though I agree - it would work out pretty well. :) "To take care of the CYOA issue, I would simply create a new category for each CYOA. To distinguish it, you would simply have a "CYOA:" or "[CYOA]" before the description for each." I like this idea. I actually feel kind of stupid for not thinking of this myself. I'll give this a go. Thanks! :)

Max_B

If you go this way the use of the CategoryJumper extension could be ehanced with this small hack I poposed once.

Achithyn

That's works really well. It took me a few minutes to figure out what your addition to the hack did - though now that I know, I feel the addition makes logical sense. Thanks for the information! :) ~Achi