Ok, I see a lot of threads about people wanting to link to forums together or people want 2 virtual forums within 1 and things like that. We'll, those things can only half be aachieved and only if that person changes all the code and stuff.
Now, I'm not saying this feature would be a quick thing, but please consider it as this (i'm pretty sure) hasn't been done by any other forum (phpbb, Vbulliten, Invision.etc)
The Idea
I'd like to call this new "feature" virtual forums. This is what I mean by that.
Say, Some guy wants 2 forums. He wants one to be discussion for cars and the other to be discussion for computers. He doesn't want to include them into the same "forum" becuase he wants different themes and basically wants them seperated. But he wants all the settings of the computer forum, to be the same as the car forum. With virtual forums, he can go into admin panel after installign SMF, and select something named... "Add Virtual Forum". This basically, creates an almost new forum where he can set new themes, view "recent topics" relative to that forum only and view who's online in that forum only.etc
The forum users one database and shares the same tables. excpt you'd need extra table fields for things like "Virtual Forum ID" for themes and "Forum Reg ID" for what forum he registered on and stuff like that. It's something that can I guess you could say easily be done if that was in the original plans when you started the SMF project but a bit harder to implement it into the current SMF forum.
I can go in much grwater depth ofcourse but I think you should get what I'm saying. No mods or anything will come close to achieving that.
No doubt it will be a large project and take a lot of work, but the actual coding of it shouldn't be too hard. Just time consuming
In the admin panel of SMF, you'd need a new section on the left named "Virtual Forums" and under that you can add up to a certain number of virtual forums per SMF Installation. There users can have settings related to sharing. For example, a few settigns may be "Show Latest Posts from all Forums", "Share Post Count Across Forums", "Share Theme", "Make Members Activiate Membership on all Forums"
...and things like that
I don't won't people to make comments like "OMG, do you know how much work that would be" or "Like Simple Machiens would ever do that"
It's only an Idea but one that I think would come in very handy for many people. Especially larger forums...
Can I have a comment please?
bump... Not one comment?
Interesting idea you have there.
Thought that popped in my head with this was that you could offer a Virtual Forum setup to members maybe, treed off your own with such a setup.
I can see some possibilities with it but it is way over my head on how to do it. ;)
good point skip,
Say you ran a gaming forum and clans wanted a private place to chat. You could basically give them there own virtual forum :)
God, I can't see how this idea would fail. As long as it is done properly with all the options...