[Michael]

Greetings!

In my previous topics, I have mentioned how I’m planning to improve my forum. As it stands, I have a list of things to sort out, as well as things I’d like to add/change.

Obviously, some of these changes will involve changing the core, including the following:

Upon running through the Vanilla Forum ‘Discussions’ page, I noticed the ‘Activity’ tab. This kinda captured my attention because my forum is really a community, if anything.

What I’d like to know is this:

1. If I attempt to introduce this kind of thing to my forum, should it be a part of the Latest Discussions (which I can change the heading for) on the front page, or should it have it’s own page, in your opinion? Of course, I’d have a few more things to include in the stream, such as updates of profile information.
2. Also, if anyone can guide me, what files would I need to have a look at to implement this? I guess I’m really looking for the files that have something to do with implementing an action, such as the file that updates a part of one’s profile. I don’t want to make mistakes and change the wrong files.

At some stage, I guess it would be nice to make a plug-in for this, but I need to learn a lot more about creating them.

I’d appreciate any help I can get for this, I would hate to screw it up and re-install.

Peace, Michael

[Ben L.]

I don’t really think avatar changes are that important, so they shouldn’t go on the front page. Maybe a view could be used?

What types of things would go in the activity stream? From what I can see, it looks like something that would be more of a social networking feature, not a forum feature. BuddyPress has it, but I don’t think that’s exactly what you want.

[Michael]

I think the whole point is to make the forum a little more social. The aim is for it to be a little more interactive.

As it it stands, it is a forum. Forums should not necessarily have this kind of thing, but I don’t have many doors to open. I’m keeping it as a forum simply because it’s a community discussion forum. I would switch to BuddyPress, but I wish it was a standalone, and I would only do that if there was more to do within the community.

I would like to include a ‘small’ social networking layer on the forum – but with minimal coding changes. I don’t want to have to do way too much to implement the changes.

I’d like to have a few things included, once they are fully functional within the forum, such as status updates, additional profile information, photo album (maybe, not anywhere near the top of the list), and maybe even a paste bin (as it is a development forum).

The whole thing for me is to make the forum have ‘more’.

I agree that it should have a separate view, though I would rather create a seperate page (possibly with a plugin) for it. Part of the changes I need to make is putting a navigation bar in place of the login/user bar at the top to include this. It will also include the most important forums – something similar to the nav bar at GUI.Station.