It is probably best explained by ‘you can please some of the people some of the time’ etc.! The two factors of pre-V5 SP that got the most negative feedback were the difficulty in customising it – and I mean REALLY customising it – and the fact that it had a very large code footprint.

So – and we have made no secret of this through the year of development – V5 was rewritten from the ground up to utilise themes and templates – more or less in the exact same way that WP is itself. When you want to move items about in your blog display – or even add something new – you edit the template. The same now applies to SP.

Making it smaller and lighter (and thus also faster) has largely been achieved by moving what used to be core functionality that many people would not use , into optional plugins. But a secondary source of much extra code were the huge numbers of options to check and branch for.

And – we are pleased to report that the overwhelming response to V5 has been very positive.

So – the whole forum is now driven by template functions (or ‘tags’ as Wp calls them) where the end user can modify various set arguments to change elements of the display, We are working to get all of these documented in the new Codex but, of course, sometimes we are tied up writing long forum posts!

So – as that documentation is not ready yet, if you tell me exactly what it is you want to change I can point you in the right direction.

Thanks for the reply – one thing straightaway are dealing with the display hooks for the aforementioned forum activity (the box at the bottom of this page). All those things like Forum stats, member stats, etc I’d like to know how to tweak and or turn off.

Also – how can I get back the breadcrumbs style navigation around the forums versus the cascading folders currently implemented.

Thank you again for the assistance. It’s very appreciated.

-Max

There are a variety of templates – spHead and spFoot which are displayed on all pages – and one for each type of forum display within. Breadcrumbs are, of course, in spHead. Stats etc., are in spFoot.

Before you start – as always we recommend that you create your own SP theme so that any customisation is not lost during a future update. (http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/themes/theme-basics/creating-a-theme/ – note that you currently will need to login separately to the codex using the same credentials).

You can use the theme editor in the forum admin > themes section.

Open spHead and find the call sp_BreadCrumbs(). Change tree=1 to tree=0

Open spFoot. You will quickly see the ‘stats’ section. It does, of course, depend on what you need to do. You can remove things or move them around. Comparing the sequence of function calls to the display and you should see easily how it is laid out.

The one thing to remember is that it is laid out in columns and you will see that each column has a width. The obvious point is that as these are percentages you must not define more than 100% overall or it will wrap the display.

If you want help or advice with anything in particular in the stats area just shout.

All right.

Had a good deal of success with the editing and I’m a pretty happy camper at the moment. Thank you for the help. I’ll say I wasn’t too sure about the actual diving into the .php but I pulled out a copy of UltraEdit from my scripting days and had at it. Pretty straightforward, at least the parts I cared about. Probably spend time this weekend switching and tweaking little things.

I had doubts about simplePress 5.x but the support here and overall forum underpinnings of 5.x seem excellent. I’m slightly saddened I didn’t see a grand speedup from my 4.5.x forums. I don’t really use every bell and whistle so I expected clear difference which I don’t really see or feel. Overall the new look is great and I have things running close to my 4.5.x status.

All is well and thank you again!

-Max

You don’t see any performance improvement? Odd as you should do. The number of SQL queries being run has, on some views, dropped by as much as 75% and the code footprint has dropped. – although obviously every plugin will; add overhead back in. Good idea to only use and have active those plugins you really want to use.

I’ll give it a thorough shakedown this weekend. My at-a-glance gut check wasn’t really registering a huge speedup but I’ll go another round. Mind you it wasn’t painfully slow before or anything.

Thanks for the reply though!

-Max