PaddleMan said

I am beginning to see the potential of the forum (vs Blog posts) and the part SP can play in my site as the heart of the interaction system. Here is a list of what I like to achive – Any suggestion on how to implement the following (or flag it as a wish list ticket) would be appreciated:

(1) I want to be able to give the users the power to rate each posts within a topic and an option to sort the posts by the most popular posts at the top.

There is an SP Post Rating plugin available which sounds like it should work for you. We have no option available to sort the posts by rating however. How would anyone make any sense of a topic thread if they were so randomly sorted?

(2) I want to be able to pick up the trending discussion (i.e. hot discussions with lots of exchanges) and be able to display the summary of them on the Home page. Ideally this ‘widget’ should be self updating so it refreshes the trending discussion ever 5 mins (through consent)

There is a ‘Hot Topics’ template tag in our SP Template Tags plugin. No widget for this currently.

(3) I want to have a section for user reviews, where the user can post his/problem-with-post-edit-buttoner ‘review’ under a topic header (or category). The user need to be able to rate the product (5 star’s?) and some extra field’s specific to the review post tpe (e.g. reviewer’s affiliation, where he got it from etc.) as well as a score.

We currently have no facility to build a form within a topic post. There may possibly be some shortcode type WP plugins that may help but I couldn’t say if that is the case.

(4) I want to be able to customise my TinyMCE editor differently for each type of posts. So for example media posts will have different editor button bar; if this is not possible, I like to be able to use the Tiny MCE’s templating feature and preselect the template based on which forum the post belong to.

Actually I know nothing about a TinyMCE ‘templating’ feature unless you are just referring to the ‘templates’ TM plugin. If so I have never tried it out but see no reason why it should not work. However – I don’t know how you suggest a ‘type’ of topic post can be identified.

Your answers are a helpful as always – but quick response:

Yellow Swordfish said 

There is an SP Post Rating plugin available which sounds like it should work for you. We have no option available to sort the posts by rating however. How would anyone make any sense of a topic thread if they were so randomly sorted?

Will give it a go.

Regarding your Q: Only the ‘Topic’ will  be sorted – not the posts within the thread. So offtopic / spammy topics get votedoff low in the list – but it is a shame you cant do anything with the ratings collected by the ratings plugin (apart from displaying it)!

There is a ‘Hot Topics’ template tag in our SP Template Tags plugin. No widget for this currently.

Thanks – but Don’t understand what I need to do from the documentation regarding this – will post a separate post shortly in the relevant forum.

…  I have never tried it out but see no reason why it should not work. However – I don’t know how you suggest a ‘type’ of topic post can be identified.

No worries – I will give it a go – I can pre-populate the template’s dropdown box with my standard for each type post – and pray that the user is savvy enough to select the correct one before completing it. It is a bit hard to implement the template – will see how I go.

Thanks again.

re hottest topics… see our footer…  wherever you want to display the hottest (ie busiest) topics on your forum just insert the template tag…

see:  http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/plugins/our-plugins/the-template-tags-plugin/template-tag-hot-topics/