Writing a Cron to Change Parent Forum

[Kiros72]

Hi, I'm trying to get a working featured forum setup that basically rotates through a certain category of forums each day. I know how to organize it in thought, but I'm stumped when it comes to writing a cron for it.

The cron would run every 24 hours and first move the featured forum back to the normal forum category (i.e. change the parent forum) and then it would have to look in a that forum category, then select one forum (in sequential order) and change the parent forum to the featured category.

Could anyone help me write up a cron to accomplish this?

[Kiros72]

No one would know, eh? =[

[Lynne]

I see this as being a lot more complicated than you think. Don't forget the permissions. The child forums inherit their permissions from the parent. What are the permissions then when you swap the child forum with the parent forum? Then the permissions are inherited from the parent's original parent. The same thing with user permissions for the forums - like access masks. This really isn't as straight forward as you'd like it to be.

[Antivirus]

Lynne is correct - it sounds like what you're looking to do is much more complicated than you might think - I think your same objective could be reached by simply displaying a "featured forum" link in the navbar, or similar

however - if I were to do this, if you must actually move the forums around based upon a cron job, make sureto do so using the forum datamanager, as lots of other things are affected by changing the parentforumid for the forum you're moving, (such as cache entries, etc...) - simply updating parentforumid with a sql statement could prove disasterous for your forums.

[Kiros72]

True, but I don't believe I have to worry about permissions since they would all be the same. I would have tried to use the forum datamanager, but the problem was how to get it to work the way I wanted it to. At any rate, I'm going to forget about this for the time being and work on it slowly when I have time.

Basically, I'm thinking that an iteration with a foreach (or two) would be the first step. Then I could compare the display order numbers to see which one should come next. Hopefully it will all come together seamlessly after a good while of staring at the monitor =/