it didn’t make V4.0.0…

on the math question… yes, but you have to configure a few things..

first, you will need two usergroups…  the first for the restricted permissions and the second for the lessened restrictrions.

then use forum ranks with auto usergroup assignment to auto move them from the restrictive user group to the less restrictive user group when X number of posts is reached.

I too would greatly appreciate subforums in simple:press. Overall it's a great plugin but I'm currently importing an older forum's contents without subforums I'm afraid it will result in a big mess.

I'm debating just hacking them in myself by adding a parent_id field to the sfforums table. All the security is handled at the group level, so our board should remain private where it matters. After that, it would simply be a matter of editing the group and forum views, breadcrumbs, and permalinks.  Perhaps the admin can simply be fixed with a little proper sorting. Done in less than an hour!

Realisticallly I don't know how much work this would really involve. If you have any advice or would like to see what I come up with, please drop me a line.

We have a few requests for this and it’s something I will probably need to tackle soon but I have no design or structure in mind yet. Not sure you’ll find it that easy though…

Thats great to hear. I recommend setting a self-referential key on the sfforums table called sfforum.parent_id (int) equal to the sfforum.forum_id of its parent or 0 if none (default). Then I recommend creating another column sfforum.allows_topics (bool, smallint or just int, default 1). That way when you do implement this, my database will match your database and the code should be interchangable. This way we're all happy.

At least that's the only way I can see this working, but I will admit to being rather unimaginative.

My biggest worry with tonights hack is the permalinks. I havn't checked out the code yet but I'm betting it will be a headache to get /forums/forum1/my-subforum/whatever and /forums/forum2/my-subforum/whatever to route properly. Ideally the 'my-subforum' and 'whatever' in each example would be different forums and topics respectively; one forum shouldn't have to consider the naming conventions of another.

good luck! as Andy says, we hope to tackle this for 4.1 but have not begun discussion on it yet. we will obviously keep your thoughts in mind…

the permalinks will be a bit sticky, but if you are careful, they will work. we have a single routine that generates most if not all urls. modifying it and the places that call it will be tedious but doable. the actual reg expressions in the permalink routine itself will modify quite easily.

Alright. We have a working demo.

It's still a little rough around the edges so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't provide a link until tomorrow (later today), but it's bedtime and I'm happy with where the code is. 

As for the permalinks, well I doubt I can get those to work within the week. The main problem is that the forum plays fast and loose with the url provided. This is good as it probably increases reliability, but leads to situations like this (check out the url and the breadcrumbs). Another issue is that forum and topic slugs are used as handles internally, so the current slug structure is hard-coded into the forum.

Also there is a conceptual problem: given '/forums/alpha/bravo/' is 'bravo' a topic or subforum? What if it's both? We could handle collisions as they occur with preferences, but that leads to unpredictable behavior. Or we could enforce unique slugs globally, but that could break existing permalinks and be a potential security issue.

But what we have now works and is usable, so these url issues are a minor issue.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your support! It's people like you guys and projects like this that makes working on open source projects so much fun.

Hey, remember me? Sorry I was incommunicado, but… you know.

Check out what I’ve put together.

What doesn’t work? RSS. I havn’t even touched that. Also security is probably spotty in that if a user is denied access to a forum, they still would have access to the subforums. Both these should be easy fixes (as in less than 10 minutes).

I moved the admin around a bit too, combining the forum sequence and forum group fields with the new forum parent field into an all-encompassing Location field. This makes things a lot simpler and prevents users from creating circular subforums. PICS! One, two, and three.

I can tell you that we just committed our initial changes to include sub forums into 4.1…  testing and tweaking needed, but they will definitely make an appearance in 4.1…