When you are first starting out with our forum it seems to me that it would be important to be able to hide forum stats until there is enough participation to then publish the forum stats.
This should be a simple configuration button to press but instead I find out there is some cumbersome process of having to create a child them and then messing with the code. For us non code people this is not a very good answer. lol
How reasonable is this feature request for the next update?
Hey Steve,
I'll start by saying yes, I understand where you are coming from..
The main reason the forum stats are intended to be edited through the template is because there is more to the stats section than just an on / off for most users that want to make changes. Some people want to only remove say the admin list, others want to only remove the newest members list etc.. Editing through the template allows you the fine control of just being able to remove one group or change it's label / behaviour.
Reboot theme does include a button to hide forum stats on the fly, although that only applies to the front end (can be seen here, next to the RSS button in the footer) although probably not what you're looking for.
As to the child theme, it's a really easy process as we supply the child theme frameworks in the store for free. All you'd have to do is copy the spFootDesktop.php and spFootMobile.php templates to the child themes templates folder and follow the guide here to remove the relevant sections. I know it's not as easy as a button in the admin panel but it shouldn't take any longer than 20 minutes.
Whether it's possible if it will be included in a future update or not I doubt, but will have to wait for Steve or Andy to answer that one.
Of course its possible... but problem is users already get lost in the myriad of options available in the admin... and we tend to subscribe to the WordPress mantra which is 'decisions, not options'... that is provide a set of predefined attributes, but allow them to be modified by hook if needed...
and then you get into, remove all the stats... or remove one item of the stats... or remove these two items... or remove all but this one... or etc etc... the possible combinations are very, very many... hard to draw a line - so we have at the basics...
adding an extra check on option would also slow down every single page load for the vast majority that do show the stats.. yes, very small amount, but slower none the less...
another one of those cases of providing a default action that supports 90% or more of the masses... but of course, not 100%... hence the support via actions... or in this case, simple commenting out of a section of the theme template file... we have also provided starter child themes for all of our themes... its not harder than downloading, selecting as your theme, copying the spFooter.php template file and commenting out the stats stuff... we can certainly walk you through it...
we certainly do understand your situation, but at this time, we do not have plans for such an option... that said, we are always listening to suggestions from our users and continually re-evaluate the various decisions...
thanks for your input!
