Support Forum

Create new topic – questionnaire style

MC mark cronin
mark cronin
Member
Member since Jul 2012
2 posts
Jul 10, 2012 · 2:30 am · Edited

Hello,

We are using Simple:Press as a forum and it works great. What we would like to achieve is for individual members to have their own forums and then have them create new topics or in our case more like a questionnaire with predefined questions that they would need to answer.

We have used the usergroups function for members to have access only to their own section, works as intended. Now we are stuck in the topic creation part.

In most simplest terms, we’d like to have more fields than ‘Topic name’ and ‘Message area’ and then those values would be inserted in the actual message when viewing the topic.

Thank you!

3 Answers

New Answer
YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Jul 10, 2012 · 3:03 am

It really depends on how far you need to take this. I.e., do you need to validate the inputs before allowing them to make the new topic post? Are the questions the same on all topics? etc.

So if the answer to those questions – and probably a lot more would need to be asked – then your best recourse would be to construct a simple plugin for the task. That would require php/JavaScript skills of course and an understanding of the SP API – and lots of advice from us!

If, however, the requirement is not that complex – i.e., validation is not an issue and the questions are always the same, then I would take a look at the forum admin > components > Custom Messages. Custom Intro text in Editor allows for a new topic to have specified text within every new topic post. As this can contain basic html then creating a small table is very simple and straightforward and may be enough.

MC mark cronin
mark cronin
Member
Member since Jul 2012
2 posts
Jul 10, 2012 · 3:37 am

Thank you for your reply!

No need for validation but there might be a case of having different questions, I’m not 100 % of that at the moment.

Tested the ‘Custom Intro Text in Editor’ function. It seems to display p, br and table tags, how do I turn those off so it would output the html code as intended?

Also, is there a way to set the intro text to show only on certain forums? We would need these to show only on certain forums and topics.

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Jul 10, 2012 · 5:22 am

mark cronin said
Thank you for your reply!

No need for validation but there might be a case of having different questions, I’m not 100 % of that at the moment.

Which would then not be possible to use this method.

Tested the ‘Custom Intro Text in Editor’ function. It seems to display p, br and table tags, how do I turn those off so it would output the html code as intended?

Ah – yes – I should have mentioned that. You really need to be using the TinyMCE Editor (SP Plugin) as that will display the tags as they should be displayed. You can also change the styling to suit your needs.

Also, is there a way to set the intro text to show only on certain forums? We would need these to show only on certain forums and topics.

At the moment no. It is all or nothing. But,  I see no reason why we couldn’t provide a filter if you needed it. If this were a suitable method then we could tell you where to put the filter code and then we would make sure that is also put in the core code for future updates.

This really would make a nice little plugin actually which would resolve the first and last problem nicely. It doesn’t exist of course but I think I will open a ticket on that so that we can discuss it for the future.