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Hpw to Show First Post in List View

JI jim
jim
Member
Member since Feb 2008
650 posts
Apr 8, 2012 · 3:44 pm · Edited

I’ve spent the past couple hours trying to add a First Post link to spListView.php to appease users who are clamoring to know who started topics in the “Unread and recently updated topics” list we show them on our main Forums page with the Group View.

I realize now, this would require a function that doesn’t appear to exist. I thought I might be able to hack something together based on sp_ListLastPost and sp_TopicIndexFirstPost, but I quickly got lost.

I’d rather not hack core files, so could we please consider this a request for a sp_ListFirstPost function that could be added to the spListView template? Unless, of ourse, there is a way to do this with template edits…

In Forum view, there is a column displaying the first post date and author with vtip excerpt. For the List view it would be great if we could show the same details/format as LastPost, with icon, “First Post” author, and age of post.

During my futile exercise I thought the following code from line 38 of spListView.php might do what I’m looking for but it doesn’t seem to be working at all.

sp_ListNewPostButton('tagClass=spButton spRight', __sp('New: %COUNT%'), __sp('View the first new post in this topic'));

Looking at sp-list-view-functions.php, it appears this should “Display new post count with link to the first new post in the topic” but there is no such count, and no link. But as I read that again, it doesn’t appear intended to show a link to the post that started the topic anyway.

Somehow, one of our users dug up an old screen shot that showed who started a topic in this view, now everybody wants it back. Thanks in advance for any guidance here…

5 Answers

New Answer
MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member
Member since Dec 2006
19,448 posts
Apr 8, 2012 · 9:20 pm

first, you are correct that you cannot show a first post in the list view… its set up just for last post…   might be possible to do it in exotic way or can be done via multiple hooks and filters… but some work…

I can open a topic for future consideration…

odd on the post count button – it has been working…  and would link to the first new post, not first post in topic…  will look into see if the button got thrown off…

JI jim
jim
Member
Member since Feb 2008
650 posts
Apr 8, 2012 · 10:07 pm

Mr Papa said
I can open a topic for future consideration…

Thanks. Our members sure noticed it missing after the 5.0 upgrade.

odd on the post count button – it has been working… 

My bad, it seems to be working fine. I was apparently viewing the list when not logged in. embarassed

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Apr 9, 2012 · 4:59 am

Thanks for the confirmation on the ‘new’ button. I was a bit surprised to hear it may have vanished!

The philosophy behind the list view was to keep it lightweight and simple. I have no issue with reviewing it and possibly adding to it but it is that way as adding in the first post details etc., adds extra database queries, code processing and overhead we wanted to avoid. But we might be able to look into making ‘extensions’ optional perhaps.

JI jim
jim
Member
Member since Feb 2008
650 posts
Apr 9, 2012 · 8:34 pm

Thanks for the consideration. I am all for fewer queries, and have done all I can to explain to our users why certain things are different than they used to be. Unfortunately some don’t seem to understand the benefit vs. feature battle, no matter how many times I remind them that we haven’t had any disappearing posts since the 5.0 upgrade – a common occurrence with 4.5.x in our forums.

If you do decide to add the function – and I won’t blame you should you decide against it – I agree it should be optional, perhaps commenting it out in the default template.