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More tedious forum progress

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Edited by Sam Marshall, Friday, 26 Jun 2009, 17:34

Given the amount of time I had to spend fixing bugs and attending meetings and doing support this week, it's not surprising I didn't get that much done on the new OU forum. Still, here's another 'oh look! It's just like the old version!' screen:

forumview.jpg

As you can see, it does indeed look just like the old version - though OU users may notice we've put back user pictures, which are already in this screen on standard Moodle.

On this screen, the 'mark unread' buttons are currently non-functional, as are the links to view discussions (I haven't done that screen yet) and the 'Add a new discussion topic' button (ditto). But paging works. Woohoo! Woohoo indeed.

New features that will be on this screen, most of which also don't work yet:

  • Sorting - the default sort is by 'Last post' date (newest first). You'll also be able to click on the other column headings to sort by 'Discussion' (alphabetical), 'Started by' (alphabetical), and possibly by 'Replies' (biggest first) - not sure about this one. This will be a proper database sort, so you can use it even if there are multiple pages. Note: This feature is already in the OU's customisation of old forum.
  • Sticky discussions - this is sort of half-done. These will display at the top of the list regardless of sort (if there are multiple sticky posts, they will show in the selected order). These may look different in some way (eg pin icon) and there will be a dividing line between sticky posts and normal ones.
  • Locked discussions - again half-done. There will be an icon (eg lock icon) indicating when posts are closed for further discussion.
  • Deleted discussions - not sure if that will be at the bottom of this page, or on a linked separate page, but there will be a way for admins to view the list of deleted discussions in the forum. [In ForumNG, nothing is 'really' deleted straight away - only marked as deleted, so admins can still see it. It can be really-deleted after 30 days, or not at all if you're feeling flush with DB space.]

Another exciting progress update next week! Maybe.

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Tim at the Lone Pine koala sancutary

Small feature request

Please sam can we have more space between the number of unread messages in the thread (which is a link to the first unread message), and the 'mark thread read' tick. On Moodle.org, I quite often hit the tick by mistake, which is really irritating. Thanks.

(Oh, and I see what you mean about TinyMCE performance. I had typed half this reply before the editor finished loading!)

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I don't think the 'Unread' number is going to be a link so this won't be a problem!

The new discussion view basically starts off showing only the unread messages (plus a bit), so you don't need that feature... I think.

If it turns out to be needed anyway, sure we can have a bit of extra space...

Sharon Monie

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Yes please to the extra space if the tick survives . . . believe it or not it is always the second question in every forum demo I do ?!

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The tick survives but the number is no longer a link so you can't really click it by accident!