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

[Mark.B]

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.