I had a smooth upgrade from Version 2.1 to Version 3.1.3 on one of my sites. Thanks for a great forum script whose wide-ranging functionality and ease of upgrade amazes me.

I'm testing a local install for upgrading highinterestsavings.ca and theblog.ca, but have run into a minor issue.

Scenario 1: http://www.highinterestsavings.ca/

As you can see, I have the full forum view of the most recent posts on a non-forum page. This was previously done quite nicely with sf_recent_posts_expanded() in sf-tags.php.

However, in 3.1.3 I now get a bunch of errors about functions not defined, such as sf_render_new_post_list_user(). I can fix these errors with:

      include_once('wp-content/plugins/simple-forum/forum/sf-page.php');
      include_once('wp-content/plugins/simple-forum/forum/sf-forumcomponents.php');
      include_once('wp-content/plugins/simple-forum/forum/sf-pagecomponents.php');

Is this a bug?

Scenario 2: http://www.theblog.ca/koodo-mobile

Here, I have the topics embedded at the bottom of a post for a specific forum. This was previously achieved by hacking sf_recent_posts_expanded() to add a parameter “whichforum”, which I then used to easily inject something like “WHERE forum_id = $whichforum” to (SELECT DISTINCT forum_id, topic_id FROM “.SFPOSTS.” ORDER BY post_id DESC LIMIT “.$limit);. Of course, now in Version 3.1.3 this has become a bit more complicated, since sf_recent_posts_expanded() now relies on other functions such as sf_get_users_new_post_list().

Before I proceed to jump deeper into code hacking, has this functionality (to display only the latest topics in a specific forum) been included somewhere by default now in 3.1.3?

Scenario 2…

There are a couple of other tags you can use to get what you want…

however, they wont look styled like the forum as they are more meant for sidebars… but they certainly will do what you want and their is plenty of class elements applied to the output so you can style it…

otherwise, you will have to dig much deeper with you hacks…

Sorry we missed that one.  It's always been a hard one to test out.

We will be mnore careful with this one in 3.2

CatStyle said:

Peter,

I like what you have done here.  Is there a way that this could be changed so that it instead shows the forum replies to the blog topic.  So, instead of the table that appears on your blog post showing the most recent posts from the forum that the blog post gets posted to, it would show the actual responses to the forum topic that was created from the blog post.  I hope that makes sense. 

That would be so cool if it could be done…

I wouldn't consider that to be a trivial tweak. If I'm understanding this right, you want it to show an actual topic view, which is quite different. Are you looking to replace the comments function in WordPress with the forum?

Unfortunately there isn't a convenient function in sf-tags.php that can be modified. Also, replacing the traditional comment functionality isn't a current intention of the forum, so I'm guessing you'd be moving into really custom territory given the current setup. Your best bet might be to hope that the developers decide to make it part of the core code.

A quick and dirty method (which might not be that quick) would be to write a custom database query to pull, say, the last 5 forum posts in a forum topic and just display those on the blog post. There would be a link to the full view of the forum thread, which readers would be forced to go to if they want to make a “comment”. Then you would disable the WordPress comments feature. This novelty of this might quickly wear off and you'd be left wanting a proper solution.

Hi Guys….

Thanks for your replies!

Peter - I think I understand what you're saying but I wouldn't have a clue as to how to do it.  I'm not very good at programming.  I've tried to learn but I guess I'm just not suited for it.  I understand how to add code and hack existing code if someone has already written the hack but that's about as far as my programming talents will take me.  Thank you for taking the time to respond to me though!

Mr Papa -  I guess a template tag that would allow me to pull in to the blog post all of the forum posts that go with that blog post.  I don't necessarily have to have it set up so that people can post comments on the blog so if there was a tag that pulled in the forum posts I could just turn off the WordPress commenting system and have the link that goes to the forum for people to comment.  What I'm really trying to do is get all of the comments that go with that blog post visible on the blog post page.  I have users that prefer to read the blog posts/comments on the blog instead of going to the forum to read and they end up missing comments that are left on the forum.  So, turning off WP Commenting and having a tag that would pull in all the comments from the forum topic that go with that blog post would work great.

We do have a template tag for this on the development plans. I wont promise it in 3.2 at this stage but one day…

okay, I will ad my comments and your comments to the ticket for consideration…  3.2 is not yet feature frozen, so it still has a chance of getting in there, but no gurantee…