Jordan Spencer Cunningham said:

The current “Recent Forum Posts” widget is all right (though the huge space in between each entry makes it a really annoyingly large widget), but there ought to be sidebar widgets for top posters and even recent top posters (for example, a list of the most active posters in the past twenty-four hours).

When you use template tags or widgets (from any plugins) you are expected to add in your own styling using the classes defined in the tag or widget. Any 'huge space' is a product of your theme and only you can deal with that.

More widgets would be nice. Looking for volunteers…

keep in mind that with template tags, there is actually more freedom and flexibility.  widgets have to be used with a widget ready theme…  not everyone uses a widget ready theme… any template tag can be entered into one of the many existing text widget plugins that accept php giving you full widget access to all of our template tags including the top posters you mentioned….  when users request additional template tags, we usually try to accomodate and add them since they can be used in both widget ready and non widget ready themes…

i second the original post to a certain degree.

I too had issues with the line spacing in the widget; there are blocks of two lines, first being the topic and second being the posting details. i wanted the lines between topic and user post info to be closer together than the distance between those blocks. After messing around for hours i managed to do that, although i don’t really know how 🙂 (I’m not much of a .css man), and without firebug i probably might have lost all my hair.

Also i wanted to give the topic line in the widget a different color, which isn’t feasible because it uses the standard link formatting inherited from wp’s theme (we use a modified version of the deafult theme for spf).

I would like *all* formattings within spf to be coming from own .css tags instead of the mixture of formattings from WP theme and SPF theme (Table borders being another issue here – if i remove the borderlines from my spf, all  the articles and pages using tables also lose theirs)

 While i’m at it, another thing about the widget; right now, i can only chose which forums to display there and which not to. I run a website for a cycling club. I 8 forums, one of which is for internal club stuff and restricted to members of the club; i have a user group for them.

If there is a new posting in there, it will show up on the widget even for not logged in users as well. It would be nice if these topics would only be visible for members of the user group.

Well – lots of things to answer here.

First – formatting of widgets/template tags. These MUST be styled by the WP theme and not the forum skin. They will be used in places where the forum skin is not loaded. If no specific styling has been set up by the user for the specific tag classes, then it inherits styling from the default classes in the theme. This is right and how it should be. The forum skin will have no influence. But we DO provide unique class names to elements of tags that can be added by the user to their theme stylesheet. This is in line with many other plugns that supply tags and widgets. Sometimes people just need to get a bit technical as there is no magic!

The question of theme CSS ‘leaking’ into the forum skin is a difficult one. It is a matter of targeted styling. a typical theme will set a style on, say ‘table’ and it’s associated elements. This is untargeted in that most often the style will be applied to ALL tables. SPF has targeted classes for ‘specific’ tables but will inherit any style that is applied globally to tables. This will often cause a conflict but is inevitable. Many users may have to tweak a style here and there to get things perfect. it is worth noting here what CSS means (and apologies for the lecture but others may read this as well). It stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ which refers to the way that styles ‘cascade’ or ripple down which means that any element not specifically targeted with unique styling will inherit the styling globally assigned to that element type.

On the subject of providing more widgets well yes – that would be nice. They are a bit of a pain to write and take up a lot of code and, as Steve said above, template tags CAN be used in widgets (without the UI I realise) but if you don’t have a widgetised theme then they are a waste of space. The real problem is development priority. With just a two man development team tasks have to be prioritised and we do listen to feature requests and weight things accordingly, Widget requests are real low on the list and come up quite infrequently. I guess we wlil get a stream of them now!!

And – finally – your point on the tag you are using. This should most certainly not allow users without access to a particular forum to see posts they should not see. Can you double check that please because if this is broken we need to address it. We have had no other reports of this however. We use the most renent posts tag on our own home page here and posts made in a couple of private development forums are not shown to those who should not see them. So please check.

thanks for the long reply!

i am not exactly a CSS coder, i’m more of a user and occasionally tweaker of existing software here (funnily, that also describes also pretty well what i do for a living, albeit in a different area of software…). I guess some trial and error is inevitable when playing with software like WP and SPF… and i found the settings i looked for, so no biggie.

the last point you referred to:

I just deleted my browsers cookie cache to make sure and tried the webpage, yep, there it is:

if you care to look at http://www.rcconcordia.de, in the widget there is a topic called

Test mal wieder von martin am 14. Januar 2010 um 11:09

in forum “internes”. Can you see that without being logged in? I can..

Please see http://www.tourgalerie.de/cpg1…..?pos=-1156 for how the permissions are set on forum “Internes” – Guests are on “no access”

no, I cannot see that topic…  get an access denied message…

Zugriff verweigert!

yep, you can’t read the topic, but its in the widget… thats what i meant! I would prefer if it didn’t show up in the widget… sorry for being cryptic 😀

have you confirmed that with tests? Logged in with a different account with different permissions etc? As I say – we don’t have that problem here using the same code.

yes, i tested it with two different guestaccounts. both will get the “access denied”-message Mr Papa also got, but thats the point i’m trying to make –  he is *not* registered on the site, *not* a member of the required usergroup – but he obviousl saw the shortcut to the article in question, or he couldn’t have reached the “access denied”-message, could he? 🙂

Sorry – my last post was because I hadn’t realised Steve had posted one.
Yes I see the topic. Whatever the other thing you linked to was it doesn’t appear to exist
I wil raise a ticket on the widget/tag to ensure it is looked at. Odd that we don’t see this behaviour…

it was a screenie showing the settings on that subforum. I used the gallerys smartlink, sorry… here is the pic  url: http://www.tourgalerie.de/cpg132/albums/userpics/10007/admin2.jpg

update: in the widget, there is a configuration setting for which subforums should be displayed in the widget.

If i set this to blank, it works as intended – the post from the restricted forum is not visible to guests.

i have 8 forums

setting blank: -> ok

setting “1,2,3,4,5,7” -> ok

setting “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8” -> bug 😀

ok, i think i can live with that…

That is useful information – thanks

Might also explain why we don’t see this here as we don’t use the widget just the template tag code that the widget uses.

The current “Recent Forum Posts” widget should have a option to display only like “20-30” letters of the Post title so it doesnt strech the page like “The bears are going…”