I tested Vanilla for a while, and liked its simplicity, as do one group I’ve set up a forum for. One neat thing Vanilla has is a Sticky Order plugin. It allows you to drag-move sticky topics in Admin, so that important ones stay where you want them. I can’t find anything like this for bbPress. Is anyone up to creating it? (Hey, _ck_!)

Vanilla’s plugin modifies the sticky db field from 0/1 to 0-9, then uses the value in outputting sticky topics. I’m not up to coding it, but I’m sure many would find it very useful.

[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

This would be a very good beginners plugin to write, it’s very simple (other than the admin interface).

bbPress fetches stickies via a separate query (which I have always found to be a waste, except for this case) and you could manipulate the results before the final template is loaded.

For example on the front-page if you looks at index.php

you’ll see that

$super_stickies = get_sticky_topics();

and then there is

do_action( 'bb_index.php', '' );

so you hook the action bb_index.php

and then you do a global on $super_stickies

and then you manipulate the order of the array as desired.

for forum pages it’s

$stickies = get_sticky_topics( $forum_id, $page );

and

do_action( 'bb_forum.php', $forum_id );

same concept

That part would take less than an hour to write.

and you’d store the order in the topicmeta

But the part that will take much more time is the admin interface.

Instead you could simply add an extra field on the post edit page that only admin would see and let them chose the topic stickiness priority.

(this is not a plugin I will be writing)

[@michael3185 Member 15 years, 7 months ago]

Not sure I grasp all that, but I’ll have a shot at it and see where it goes, so thanks for the advice. Hacking around in the files is as good a start as any. Not sure what you mean by ‘do a global’ though… (Never done any php programming, and am new to bbPress too).

A related question (for anyone); is there any simple documentation for how to hook things into bbPress via plugins, etc., that is, the correct way?

[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

If you have never done php programming the admin menu is going to be far too much for you to do.

But someone else might take up the project eventually.