I looked at the ‘merge forum’ function but that would just move from one child-forum to another and still leave us with child forums.

Why would it? The merge function allows sub-forum to parent or any other level merges.

Actually I just tried editing my original post to be more clear, as I misspoke……we don’t have Parent Forums, what we have are Groups with forums……..it’s the ‘groups’ structure I’d like to eliminate.

The merge function does not let me select the “Group”.

This is for a small travel site, and ideally we’d like to have just three forums when someone lands on our Community (forum) page – ‘resort questions’, ‘destination questions’, and ‘general travel questions’, with all threads/topics contained within each forum.

But when I tried to create a new Forum (thinking I’d merge the topics into that one), it requires that I select a “group” first…..that’s what I’d like to avoid……I want to minimize the ‘drilling down’ necessary for someone to read or post a topic.

Is that possible? Any creative suggestionss?

But if you have one single group with three forums in it then that is as ‘drilled down’ as you can get as a starting view. The group part of it it just like a heading and you would have what you want – 3 forums ready to click on to view the topics. Surely that is what you need to merge down to…

I see your point……I guess I will just have one group and three forums, and just make sure my forum ‘home’ page displays the group as ‘opened’ ……I think right now it’s default behaviour is closed and I want as few clicks as possible for site visitors.

Thanks for your quick response.

The default is always open. Your last action (open/close) is saved as a cookie so that it is reflected when next you load the group view page.

And that control can, of course, always be removed in the group view template if desired.

Nevermind……it took removing another widget and then readding the forum posts widget, then it worked……

DISREGARD:

Well everything went smoothly and I’m happy with how it looks now….

HOWEVER I have one more issue – the widget on our site homepage that shows recent forum posts no longer works.  I updated the WP Settings>Permalinks and the Simple:Press Forum Permalinks (which hadn’t changed, but I click to update anyway because I know that sometimes when I reorganize WP content I have to update the WP Permalinks)…..

I’ve removed and re-added the widget but it doesn’t display my recent forum posts – do I need to rebuld the forum indexes?  Is there another step that I’ve missed perhaps?

Have you specified forum IDs in the widget options – perhaps to forums that no longer exist?