Help with a couple of forum modifications

[Tauzero]

Hello all
I am managing a small forum for use with the company I work for.  The forum is hosted on a computer on our company intranet.  My boss has requested a mod to this forum to meet some needs he has for the forum.   He would like to accomplish two things:

Firstly, he has been setting up boards to be used as agendas for meetings.  As such he would like each meeting to be contained on a separate board.  He would therefore like a way to create a new board from a template that has a topics set up for each agenda item or that has child boards set up for each agenda item.

Secondly, he would like a way to have a number of related topics on one board but individuals would only see topics based off their membergroup.  I was thinking this could be done by either applying permissions to the topics directly, or mirroring the topic on another board.

I'd like to know, are there mods that already do these functions?  If not, does anyone have advice for coding these?  I would be making these changes on company time, so paying for a mod might be a cheaper option for the company.  So if anyone knows about details of commissioning mods, that would be helpful too.  Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

~Tau

[perplexed]

Hello

I was just reading your post and thinking about meeting agendas.  As you probably know, there are several levels in a forum starting with category > board (or child board) > topic > posts

If your boss wants a new board every time he has a meeting, then the board would have the meeting title, date, time etc and inside the board each agenda item would have it's own topic.  This might be good to discuss each agenda item separately.  He is also going to end up with a lot of boards if he has a lot of meetings

Or he has a board for meetings and starts a new topic for every new meeting, and puts the agenda with bullet points in the first post, then everyone discusses it in the same topic.  This might be generate more of a discussion that the first option and might be easier to find everything.

He could think about using a category for meetings, then create some boards for different types of meetings, then perhaps a child board for individual meetings or just a topic for each meeting.

There is a mod called 'post prefix' which might help you with agenda points, there is a post in the mod thread about how to hardcode your own fields in the post so you could have something like:

Date:
Subject:
Attended:
Agenda:


Group access is usually done at board level, so it would be easier to organise your topics by board and give access by member group.  There is also a mod called 'copy topic' which will allow you to copy topics to other boards.

Does that help you?

[Tauzero]

First of all, thank you for your reply.  It's always nice to get an answer quickly.

On the meeting agendas, using a separate topic for each meeting is likely the best solution.  I think the plan to make each meeting a separate board was to replicate the look of a newsgroup (something my boss is familiar with), with threads and subthreads and the like.  The thing I think he was looking for was to keep all discussion on each topic together which would make it more searchable.  PrefixPost might fullfil some of that need.  I will have to discuss with him and see what exactly will best fit his needs.

As for the other topic, what would be optimal would be instead of copying the topic manually each time is if whenever a new post was made on either thread, it would automaticly copy to the other.  Is this realisticly doable?  And if so, how?  If not, why not?

My boss tends to be pretty good about problems being result driven, so if there is an easier way acomplish the same goals, it usually goes over well.  On the other hand, he likes to know the options and make the choice on his own.  Any help you can give would be apriciated.

Thanks,
~Tau

[metallica48423]

One way you might do it is to create a php script that is part hybrid SSI.php and use some of SMF's functions to do it.

SMF is largely functionalized so by invoking those functions by calling SSI.php then including the relevant source file you can utilize those functions to manipulate the board data.

Which version of SMF are you looking to use?  I'm thinking one could write a script that takes some form inputs and use that to create the board, then some topics within the board.  It actually wouldn't be too difficult to do.

Of particular interest are the createBoard() and createPost() functions.

[Tauzero]

In case any of it makes a difference my ful version information is as follows:
Forum version: SMF 1.1.4
PHP version: 5.2.5
MySQL version: 5.1.23-rc-community
Server version: Apache/2.2.8
GD version: bundled (2.0.34 compatible)

[metallica48423]

Okay.  Then those function Database entries should apply to your version then

[Tauzero]

There is one further question I have.  We would like a way to modify the defult permissions of a newly created board.  Currently, the default is to give everyone permission to the board, we'd like to change it so that a board can be made with the same access permissions as another board.  I'm not sure which files I'd have to modify to do this.  Will modifying the manageboards.php be enough?

[SleePy]

In 1.1.x you would have to manually edit the board to use local permissions and then copy permissions from that board.

In SMF 2.0, you can use permission profiles and create profiles that have a set of permissions. You can then use that as needed for each board.

Remember you can also create child boards as well.

If you need help on auto-creating boards. Look at The ManageMaintenance source script. When it is fixing errors and needs to create a salvage board, it will do it automatically. Hopefully it could help you with this

Don't forget the Function Database as well It contains useful information about SMF functions (currently does not show SMF 2.0 functions)
http://support.simplemachines.org/function_db/

[Tauzero]

Where do i find the ManageMaintenance script?  I could not find a php file by that name in the source folder.  Is it a 2.0 only thing?  Is it avalible for download somewhere?

[Bulakbol]

ManageMaintenance.php is in SMF 2. Beta 3 Sources folder.