[mdevour]

Originally Posted by calorie

When you add a new forum try:

• Parent Forum: No one
• Act as Forum: Yes

<LOL> I guess I really shouldn't try writing instruction manuals, eh? I think I lost you completely!

I don't need vBulletin's fancy category behavior, where the category titles are live links to a subforum and there's a button at the right that lets you collapse and expand the grouping on the forum index page. That's only going to confuse my members. Why do it that way on such a small board?

But I do want the simple appearance of a strip with a category name at the top of each grouping of forums, in my example; On Topic Stuff and Off topic Stuff.

By experimenting with it, I've found that a forum acting as a category, but without any child forums, almost does what I want. It displays the name and separates the category from the one above it. The only problem is the name being a link and the collapse control at the right end of the strip are both useless.

So it looks like one way I can achieve what I want is to suppress those behaviors in the template that generates the forumbit for a forum that's set to act as a category. A new forum variable set in the ACP and modifying that template with some conditionals should let me do that.

Is that the best way to do it, though? Instead, could I use a plug-in to modify the behavior of the PHP routine that generates the forumbits to call a complete template of my own so I don't have a template mod to deal with at installation or system upgrade?

Sorry if my questions are not understandable enough. I'm trying to be precise in my language and use the terms that Jelsoft uses for things.

Be well,

Mike D.