EPC Add Mass Child Forums Hack
 

Concept Questions:

Q: Who is this for?

A: The ones that are setting up FRESH forums or extending your forums to a greater length, but more in the respect of having multiple forums, such as an example:

1.Having to start a State Forums, that has 39 Counties, 281 Cities:

http://www.forums.washingtonstateforums.com/

Took approximately 1.5 hours to finish this portion of the project with this hack.

2.These forums are all the same within;
Main Forums >> Counties >> Cities >> Sub-forums that are similar

Sub-forums that is similar:


Q: What if I do not need this hack?

A: Then move onto the next hack that is on vB.org here ;), there is not any need to saying, ?I don?t see any use for this hack.? The usage is stipulated above for who would benefit from this hack.


How to use this hack:

? Once you have read the installation and installed properly then you are ready to start utilizing this hack.
? Login to your forums Admin Control Panel i.e. /admincp/ as an Administrator;
? Navigate to: Forums & Moderators >> Add Mass Child Forums;
? Once you are there you will see the like the following attached screenshot below.
? Have your list of forums that you are ready to drop into ?Title? box, as you see there in this example we have 14 sub-forums to add to seven primary (parent) forums.
? Once you done the above you can then press Save, (Do not close the screen or you will kill the addition).

Key notes:

• Making sure your php.ini is set to allow for longer script running times as an example from one of ours: (This is an example below, not saying it?s recommended, but it?s nice to increase your settings if you are working on setting up a massive forums)
  • max_execution_time = 9000
  • memory_limit = 32M
• When you add the list of sub-forums, you will notice it will inherit the ?parent? forums settings, so we suggest you not set not settings to the parent forums until you have all of your forums on there and ready to go, i.e. let us say you have parent forums set to Closed and it says (Forum is Closed for Posting), well this will inherit all those settings.
• If you do accidentally set the forums to closed, what you need to do is run a query inside MySQL as follows, as you see below we are telling MySQL to change all the following forums to be OPEN less the HTML allowed in the forums:

Contents:

1. New add_mass_child_forum.php for your /admincp/ folder;
2. Revised cpnav_vbulletin.xml for your /includes/xml folder, just a tiny bit of code added:

3. Installation instructions installation.txt
4. Concept in PDF EPC Add Mass Child Forums Hack Concept.pdf

That is basically it! If you have any ideas, concerns, or questions, feel free to ask on vbulletin.org in our designated forums area here. All support will be given here as best as we can, or perhaps another can assist if we don't in a timely manner. Remember this is a free hack and if you find it that you like it feel free to donate too us, because we believe in saving a webmaster time.

Hey can I say Reserved finally? :)

nice. very useful for big boards. :)

installed

Thanks!!! Talk about a nightmare, these forums are not even close to being done, I wanted to share this hack instantly because I posted in the area wondering if one of these were out there, apparently there wasn't none:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=143619

All the best!

Really good idea, I applaud your willingness to start on this almost immediately. I'm planning on opening up a big board soon and I will be using this hack. Thanks!

You are welcome, and if you see any improvement in there please let me know, as you seen the above link up in the "Concept" as an example literally took me about an 1.5 hours to drop in all the 14 categories in the selected cities then to save me from 100+ hours of repetitive crud.

I am now planning on a "mass edit forums hack" now, because the repetitive tasks that are the same within 281 cities needs to be streamlined rather than piddling around.

So any ideas throw them my way and I'll implement them accordingly.

Thanks for the comments.

Thanks a lot, Blogtorank :p

NP, if you have any issues let me know :cool:

This has been widely requested in the past. Thank you for taking the time to release it.

Glad to have done so, I know it would be a great addition if vB did implement this portion in their product as a preset already to go so no one wouldn't have to download just to hack... I have another way I did this using a flat txt file. I'll share that here in a little bit, which gives an additional drop-down in the Manage Forums area in vBulletin...

That way is nicer on the server resources if you are not slaving the MySQL Databases as you should when running 4,000+ forum categories like I did with the above forums.

Anyhow I'll get those up later to share as well. So basically a 2 part hack here!