[aral]

Ok, I have something that works. A little fiddling revealed that its actually quite simple (The more I see the code for VBulletin, the more I like it!)

In the interests that it will be helpful for someone else (at least as a starting point), I've attached a screenshot explaining the various levels and a zip containing the following templates:

forumhome_forumbit_level1_nopost
forumhome_forumbit_level1_post
forumhome_forumbit_level2_nopost
forumhome_forumbit_level2_post
forumhome_forumbit_level3_post

I haven't created a forumhome_forumbit_level3_nopost (a category nested under a category) since I don't see myself using it (it would be too confusing for users.) It should be easy enough to hack together if you need it using the information here.

Please note that I've commented out the Last Post columns in these templates -- please comment them back in if you need them.

A note on collapsing subforums: When I first tried this, collapsing a first-level category did not collapse the posts in its child category (although it did collapse the category row itself.) I hacked the templates to allow this (by replacing tbody with tr at the end of forumhome_forumbit_level2_nopost.) [Update] This doesn't work when there's more than one forum on the third level. I believe what is needed is a code hack to the toggle_collapse() javascript function in vbulletin_global.js (along with the parent/child ids.) I am not attempting this at the moment since I don't know the codebase well enough.

Sorry to release this here but I'm smack in the middle of a project. I'd love to release it as a real hack when I get a little time to read up on how to package and release VBulletin hacks properly.

Enjoy!

Note: For some reason, I don't seem to be able to upload a .gif or .png attachment (the screenshot). I keep getting a "Cannot find server" error. The Zip upload works.

Update the screenshot is available here (levels_explained.png; 21k).