My take on how "What's New?" should be done
 

I thought I'd post this over here rather than my traditional choice of vbulletin.com as (a) this sort of stuff is very much modification and related and (b)...well I won't go into (b) actually.

I usually accompany this sort of thread with screenshots but I have been roundly criticised for this in past, even though my main motivation in doing so was avoiding making it look like I was "spamming" by posting links. But, links it is. Anyway this particular thing really needs to be "seen" in action rather than simple screenshots.

With a little help from several of Andreas's modifications and some painstaking tweaks and hacking of my own, I have come up with what I believe to be very close to how I'd like What's New? to actually work.

LINK

Basically this gives you by default, Forums, Groups and Blogs all in the same view. It then has "Tabs" to allow the individual content types to be separated out.

The downside? It's unclean! The search_resultslist template to do all this is now such a mess that it is liable to cause a diplomatic incident if viewed in public! I'm working on whether some of the code can be done in plugins but, frankly, that will be little better. But, it works, and whilst the whole thing might crash a *really* busy site on a rubbish server, mine seems to cope pretty admirably with it.

Has it made people use blogs and groups more? Frankly, no, not yet, but it's only been in place for a week or so.

I like it Mark.

I think this is what the What's New should be.

I tried Andreas What's New reloaded mod but it stopped workiing after a few hours. It keeps saying there's nothing new. Have you had anything like that happen? If so, I'd love a fix of some sort.

I like it!

VERY nice!

Interesting...

I had that, it's something to do with the "list of content types" it installs in the USERCP.

When you visit the user cp this gets "blanked out", meaning no content types are selected. If you then save it you have a problem.

I think that's the issue - I simply removed that (think you untick a plugin) and it worked ok after that, but I do remember it being an issue.

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Wayne Luke mentioned on vbulletin.com that the original plan with What's New? was to have tabs. I think a screenshot even appeared. That was the first I'd heard of it as it had all been in the alpha forums back in 2009 apparently.

Anyway that gave me the idea....I'd never thought of it before. I'd already got the various content types to show, then I thought "why not have tabs"?

In an idea world of course, they'd be Ajax-powered etc etc but that's beyond my rather limited skillset.

I was actually going to make that suggestion in this thread, however, it would seem like something that would actually increase the page load time for something like that.

I guess it would depend how clever you are (and I'm not very!).

You already have the "All" tab loading by default, so that's your page load right there. The trick would be in using the other tabs to AJAX-load the same search result but with the non-required content types filtered out somehow. Rather than loading four separate searches all at once.

I'm sure it could be done but it's way beyond me. I've never really worked with AJAX.

Since the results are already there i would just generate all arrays at once in the php background. And then create all tabs on the first load via vb:each loops.

Thanks...way beyond my knowledge though that. :o