LAST thing(PIC) Creating U.S. States & somehow redirect users to their state's forum

[Sam1985]

Hello,

Thank you for looking, we are in need of your help. We don't know what to do.

We are setting up an education website for teachers.
We have so much of our free information to post on the forum, however we do not want to throw everything at a teacher at once. Here is what we would like to do:

• We want the site to be categorized for each state.
  So for example we want to create user profiles fields from admin panel and make a drop down with all the states, so at signup the user will have to pick a state. This is step one. No Problem.
  
  
• Here is where we want to make it unique for each user from each state.
  We would create all the forums like (General Discussion, Information for New Teachers, States...etc.) No Problem
  
  
• Then make subforums in "States" with all 50 states in the form of subforum under the main forum State. No problem.

The Question: How can we make it so that evertime the user logs on they are directed to their state's forum? makes sense? So that they are not ovewhelmed by the amount of info for each state or have to navigate to their state.

VB is so great, we were able to find a lot of the things to get us started. This is the only mod we need for now. Does something similar to this exist?
I was thinking of making usergroups, but we do not want to restrict access to other states. That is not what we want. We want the user to have info for their state(by being redirect to the approperiate forum, so some kind of trick/mod like that. If they wanted to search other states, the can.)
We are open to suggestions or comments.

EDIT: We have attached a pic of what we would dream about for what we need here it's actually a photoshop of vbindex(credit for the pic). If we can make something like that, that would be our dream
Thank You so much.

[Sam1985]

Of course u guys know what you are doing, but excuse me if i ruin the meaning of the word code here

perhaps speaking in php code( sorry for my bad code language) could help someone understand my big post.
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1- Create 1 php file with info for each state.

2- Use another vb index mod or general/custom index page when user logs on instead of redirecting them to the forum. or display welcome index page if user is not registered.


3- use and if statement(?! i dont know what im talking about here) or include command(that php file we made in step 1) to read "state" from user profile, then display that php file if user state is true.

this possible?
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This is possible, but there must be some parallelism between the forum ids and the state ids of the user profile field. Once you have that, you can easily direct to that forumid or write a query that pulls info from that id.

[Sam1985]

Originally Posted by Danny.VBT

This is possible, but there must be some parallelism between the forum ids and the state ids of the user profile field. Once you have that, you can easily direct to that forumid or write a query that pulls info from that id.

thanks so much for the reply. I am very happy that is could be possible.

Please do explain "parallelism". how do i make it? Right now the forum has not launched yet and I only have 2 members, the admin and a test account. I have not created profile fields/forums yet.

How do I go about doing this?

thanks so much for your help.

By parallelism, I mean you need some way to relate the state ids in the profile field drop-down to the forum id of that specific state. Some quick thoughts that come to mind:

1.) Make them equal. (IE: Alabama would have an id of 1 of the drop-down and forum id 1 will also be the Alabama forum.) This, however, could get pretty messy.

2.) A separate table, so you can link between the two.

| stateid | forumid |

You can query the table with the state id, and pull the forum id and use it...

[Sam1985]

I understand now. Yea it will be very messy. I see it.

How about using logi. webtemplates to create a page. Let's say we create a page for Alabama and it would be something like mydomain.com/view.php?pg=alabama

having it direct them to the forum is not important. we want them to see the page above @ view.php?pg=alabama then we can put anything for them there.

is this easier than linking the forum? actually this way this will be better than linking profile with forum.
is this more difficult? how is the process for this one like.

Originally Posted by Sam1985

I understand now. Yea it will be very messy. I see it.

How about using logi. webtemplates to create a page. Let's say we create a page for Alabama and it would be something like mydomain.com/view.php?pg=alabama

having it direct them to the forum is not important. we want them to see the page above @ view.php?pg=alabama then we can put anything for them there.

is this easier than linking the forum? actually this way this will be better than linking profile with forum.
is this more difficult? how is the process for this one like.

I'm not familiar with that modification so I wouldn't be able to determine how difficult it will be.