Apologies for the delay in responding.

There are some possible ways of displaying a small list of topics within a particular forum but your scenario begs a couple of questions that need clarification.

The first is ‘forum that they pre-created’. How do you propose allowing your users to create actual forums? Isnlt this somewhat dangerous?

And the second question would be how could such a forum be ‘automatically’ recognised?

There would only be a need to have a few custom posts of this type per year, maybe half a dozen (they are special voting posts).  Each post needs to have the first few threads in the simplepress discussion pertaining to the post displayed in the post, and when the user clicks ‘see all discussions’ they go to a list of all the discussions relevant to that post – not all discussions in a given forum.  We could use wordpress comments, but it would be better to keep the discussions in simplepress.

If there is a way to achieve this using a forum per custom post that would be fine, or if there was a way of having all the simplepress threads pertaining to the custom post identified with a tag that identified them as being related to that custom post, that would be fine.  But when the user clicks ‘see all discussions’ they need to see only the discussions relative to the post, not all discussions related to all the other posts.

Does that make sense?

have you seen our featured topics and posts plugin?  might be what you want or get  you close, if I am understanding you…

I haven’t used the featured topics and posts plugin, but I’m assuming that for a topic or post to be featured, it would need to already exist, and we have no way of knowing up-front if discussion threads will already exist and we certainly don’t want users to have to go back to the custom post and edit it with featured topics. 

What I’m looking for here (as per the diagram thing I uploaded) is a way to show the first two or three discussion threads (if they exist) that pertain to a particular custom post in a section of the custom post, and then if the user clicks ‘see all discussions’ then the user gets taken to a list of all the discussions that pertain to a particular custom post.

Is there a way to filter by tags (list all discussions with a particular tag)?  Then I could simply state that if the users want to identify a discussion thread as pertain to a particular custom post then they can tag the thread with a particular tag.  But, because there won’t be many posts of the custom type I’m assuming it would be easier to create one forum per custom post and then if the user posts anything in that forum it will automatically be ‘findable’ to anyone clicking ‘see all discussions’ because ‘see all discussions’ would simply link to the forum.

Does that make sense?

yes, the topics would have to exist beforehand…

you mention tags…  are you using our tags plugin?  it includes a template function for listing related topics based on the tags..  but its really set up based on topic id (ie within forum)…  but it would be possible to modify it based on tag…

the issue is that we dont have anything directly to do this…  you can list a bunch of topics based on a specific forum…  but not sure how you would pick the topics to list… has to be based on something…  so forum or tags makes sense, but a bit of custom code needed… 

our api certainly supports it… just not something anyway has requested before…  I actually like the idea of making a wp blog post linked to forum via tags or other…  just not there today…

How would I list the first few topics in a given forum (meaning the first 2 or 3 latest topics in that forum)?

Try the template tags plugin… Multiple template functions and a widget for showing recent/latest posts in a forum… You can select the forums and/or number…

Many thanks – also, is the ‘blog post linking’ plugin something that could be used for this?

The blog link plugin allows users with the appropriate permission to have (a) a new forum topic created that mirrors a blog post with an optional link placed in the  display of both to each other – or (b) a blog post to be created from a new forum topic’s first post. In both cases this has to be done at the point of publishing.

That sounds great, many thanks, I will try that out.

glad we could help… let us know how it goes…