What to do with post counts from containers / forums not listed on main page

@Drake: The topics/post count is definitely visible on the 1st level just like it always was. What's new is it is now visible on the 2nd level as well, which it never was before. The question here is what to do about posts in forums at the 3rd level or below.

Michelle

Yes, any post in forum1, forum2, forum3, and forum4 should show up on the main page. Your example doesn't have any subforums. If it did, the subforum posts would show up like subforum1 (42). it's when you get past this level that there's a problem because they aren't shown on the front page at all so there is no indication that they exist.

Michelle

No, if you've hidden the subforum list, you're not going to see posts in the subforums because you've hidden them.

Michelle

It isn't a matter of fixing; it isn't broken. If you choose to hide the information that AF provides, that doesn't make AF broken. This is a architectural discussion about how best to present the information given the wide variety of possible configurations that Drupal allows.

Michelle

This isn't a feature request; this is a discussion. No decisions have been made, yet.

Michelle

If you don't display the subforum, where are the post counts supposed to go? Having a list of post counts with no forum names by them doesn't give you any useful information. Adding the post counts to the parent is inaccurate, though stand alone software I've looked at seems to choose the inaccurate route so I guess it does have the advantage of being a familiar lie.

Michelle

The trouble is that is subjective. Personally, I always found it very confusing when I look at the main forum page and it lists the forum and how many posts are in it and the last post and I click on it only to find that those posts aren't actually in that forum but rather in a subforum. Other people find it confusing to have posts in a subsubsub forum not show up as part of the great-grandparent forum post count.

Michelle

Yes, most forum software does this. I'm not arguing with that. I was just trying to come up with a better design for something that I always was bothered by when using other forum software. But it's clear that people want me to copy, not innovate, so I guess I will change it.

Michelle

I was just looking at this on my own installation and thinking it was a bug.

It seems natural to me that you should see the total posts for the subcontainers. Sometimes innovation isn't necessary; things are the way they are because it works.

I think the best option would be to add the functionality and allow the user to select which way they wish to do it, or provide the variables and info so that someone writing a theme for AF2 can choose to implement it that way.

I have a simple message board on a personal Drupal site using Advanced Forum 1.2, and now I'm having to implement a more complex one for the Drupal website we have at work. I was originally going to set up phpBB since I've had experience with that for years, but I wanted everything properly integrated with Drupal so I decided to go with the Drupal Forums / Advanced Forums solution.

I've run the current setup passed some of the users and they find it confusing since they are expecting to see it look more like AF1.2 instead of they way it's handled in AF2.

I realized it wasn't a bug once I saw this post, and it saved me quite a bit of time.

Since I'm going to have to do this for work, anyway, I'll see if I can hash out something and submit a patch for the last-post info. Hopefully, I'll have something up in a week or so.

Just an update:

I think I've got it all hashed out. I'm finishing up my theme today and then I'll let the users at the office look it over and test it. It doesn't appear to break anything for the existing themes; it just adds more information for those who want their hierarchy to go deeper.

If it looks good I'll clean up the code and upload some patches either later this week or early next.

Ok, here's my initial patch for this issue. At my job we're wanting to make Advanced Forum 2's forum list look like AF1's, so that's what the new themes I've included focus on. I've called the new themes "traditional", like "Naked Traditional", "Silver Bells Traditional", and "Cloudless Day Traditional".

The modifications to the code and the additional information being passed into the templates should enable a lot more flexibility in designing forum list layouts without having an effect on any of the current themes.

When I was adding child post-counting to containers I made the decision to only increment the container's "child" post properties (child_total_topics, child_new_topics, etc.) since containers don't have posts and topics in and of themselves. For that reason I modified the Naked theme to display the child post information when display a container's post info.

A list of changes is below:

• Fixed incorrect html ids when processing the "root" container in the "naked" theme.
• Fixed broken html classes in subcontainer and forum rows (an extra 'class="' was generating incorrect class information).
• Added 'last_post_info' property to each $forum object. Currently, advanced_forum_process_forum() takes the last_post information that is retrieved from the database and replaces it with a themed "last post" text. Since some themes might want to get at this information, I've added it back in and renamed it last_post_info so it doesn't break the existing functionality of last_post.
• Modified loop in _advanced_forum_preprocess_forum_list() to use a new $parent variable instead of $items[$item-parents['0']] to make it easier to follow what's going on. Also reduces a bit of typing.
• Modifications to _advanced_forum_preprocess_forum_list() also uses last_post_info to allow information about the latests posts in a subcontainer to bubble-up to its parents.
• Created a new "naked_traditional" theme that uses the new functionality to create a full hierarch of the forums being viewed. Naked Traditional changes the table to have 4 columns instead of 5, integrating the forum icon into the name & description section. This was done to provide better support for indenting items in the hierarchy.
• Likewise, created silver_bells_traditional and cloudless_day_traditional. These are mostly the same as their originals, but have been modified to support a couple of new CSS tags used by naked_traditional.
• Modified the comments for advanced_forum.naked.forum-list.tpl.php to document the new variables that are available. Also removed references to $forums and $forum_id since those are not passed into the template in Advanced Forums V2.0.

This is also my first patch that is being uploaded using git's format-patch, so I have my fingers crossed that this will work.

Hi

Thanks for this patch. I tried to apply the patch to the AF using the NetBeans IDE tool but something goes wrong here...
I don't get any additional styles (naked_traditional, silver_bells_traditional, etc..)
Could somone post already patched AF module as a zip package or similar?
Would be really appreciated.

Thanks

ok thanks.. i will try to do that but if you can please upload a straight diff for the changed files and a tar of the new ones

Greetings and thanks a lot!!!

Drake, I've tar'ed the new files up along with a standard diff of the patches. When you extract the file below it will create a directory called "patches".

1. Copy the 1110154-24.patch file to your advanced_forum directory and run "patch -p1 < 1110154-24.patch".
2. Copy the patches/styles directory into your advanced_forum directory.

Make sure you clear all of your caches, including your theme registry cache and it should work.

Was able to solve this by deleting this

<?php if (is_array($item->children)) {
$zebra = 'even';
foreach ($item->children as $child_index => $child) {
$zebra = $zebra == 'odd' ? 'even' : 'odd';
$child->zebra = $zebra;
_advanced_forum_naked_traditional_render_item($child);
}

from advanced_forum.naked_traditional.forum-list.tpl.php

Thanks for making this great patch!