List all forums from all folders button

[Phorum]

As it stands currently, admins have no quick access to forums which may be nested deep in a folder hierarchy. Maurice says he has plans to add a more robust forum and forum folder manager.

But as a short term fix, perhaps a "List All Forums" button above the list (or to the right of "Go Up") would work nicely. It lists all forums by name, regardless of parent folders. ''(Listing the parent in the row is optional--but would be nice.)''

Related to this might be the addition of a "tally" of child forums in a folder. Presently, if the admin creates a forum and assigns it to a folder, and they don't understand the system well yet, the forum just seems to vanish. There is no visual cue anywhere that it's actually contained by an existing folder somewhere. So unless the newbie admin notices the "browse" button, and drills down the folder tree, they never find it. I've tested this out on several people on my staff already. Only 1 of 5 figured it out without help from me. A tally reading like '''FolderName (3 items)''' would solve this problem adequately, and remove one more training (and docs) issue.

If it gets rendered obsolete by a later collapsing folder tree, so be it. This would be good enough for Government work, as they say.

Reported by: Wheezer Imported from TRAC: http://trac.phorum.org/ticket/658

[Phorum]

''It lists all forums by name, regardless of parent folders.''

Do you have any idea how this would work with thousands of forums? ;) I guess it wouldn't work at all in this environment or in the end would bring down the server.

By: ts77

[Phorum]

With thousands of forums, the list all option would indeed become a really slow page to load. But I do agree that it would be good to have some easier forum tree management to work with, which also will work with thousands of forums. The new forums API that I'm writing for the current trunk (future 5.3) will support a better forum interface, which ultimately could even use Ajax for growing a tree, just like you would when building a desktop gui for browsing a file tree or so.

Anyway, instead of a "list all" option, I would rather go for a search interface, to show a limited list of matching forums/folders. This would match the idea of the user admin interface, where you face the same kind of lookup problems if the number of forums grows a lot.

By: mmakaay

[Phorum]

Replying to [comment:1 ts77]: << Do you have any idea how this would work with thousands of forums? ;) I guess it wouldn't work at all in this environment or in the end would bring down the server.>>

Of course, very large lists need considerations, and I was not suggesting this was anything more than a patch until a better nav was done by someone already suggesting it was was on his list. Even "Find by name" would avoid this need to traverse even a shallow tree, looking for a named forum.

By: wheezer technicull@gmail.com