Generate table of contents page for forums... $$ offered

[Rich_Z]

Sorry if this is covered somewhere in this forum, but it would probably take me forever to locate it by hunt and peck searching.

I'm generating a rather complex forum with several levels that will probably be a burden for users to navigate through one layer at a time. Although a hiearchical structure is a good way to organize the forums, it's a real pain if the one you want is four levels down.

What I want to do is to create a table of contents page that will show the entire forum at a glance, and allow a user to go directly to the forum of interest with a single click of the mouse.

Now the interesting thing is that this code already exists in vBulletin but needs to be modified for my needs. In the Admin section, under the heading Forums & Moderators, clicking on the Modify link gives me what I need except I need all the extraneous stuff removed. Basically I just need the name of the forum with the link to the forum itself.

I believe the Forum Jump display could be used as a basis as well for what I want. I just want this as a front page entry point to the forums.

I would want this as an option within the Admin menu since I may need to change the structure periodically and this would make management a lot easier to do.

Should be a snap for a PHP programmer, which unfortunately I am not.

Does this already exist or is someone willing to take a crack at it?

I don't think I am the only one working on a convoluted forum, so perhaps it would be useful to other people as well.

BTW, I am perfectly willing to pay for this work done for me.

Thanks for the consideration.

[Rich_Z]

I guess this one is too easy. Sorry, but I just need this one and don't have the time to figure out the innards of vBulletin to do it myself. I'm under a real time crunch.

How about if I ad the spec that it must eliminate the federal income tax and cure AIDS at the same time?

Thanks.

[Xenon]

well, i'd say you should make it hardcoded, because the forumhome is one of the most seen pages and should load fast, but, if you just want all forums to see on forumhome, there is an option within your acp (vbOptions) which defines the depth of the forumhome (standart is 2, just change it to 5 for example)
then all you have to do ist to create new templates forumhome_displayforumbit_level3....
(you can just copy the ones for level 2 if you want...)

[Rich_Z]

Thanks for the advice, but I guess I wasn't clear on what I want.

I want to have a separate HTML document that will be a table of contents between the main page of my site and the front page of the forums. The number of forums I will have in vBulletin is going to be quite overwhelming for new viewers, so I don't want to overwhelm them right off the bat.

The main page of my site is www.FaunaClassifieds.com. I would put the link on this page to the forums to something like www.FaunaClassifieds.com/forumTOC.html, which would be the table of contents to the forums themselves. I really don't want the main page of the forums themselves to do this job, because (1) bandwidth will suffer moreso than the plain vanilla HTML document would cause, and (2) the manner in which vBulletin displays multilevel forums (without modifications) is not what I have in mind to make it easier and clearer to my visitors to get where they may want to go.

Since vBulletin already creates something similar in a couple of places in the admin section, I felt it would be best to utilize this code and modify it for my use. For instance, under the Forums & Moderators heading, if you select 'Modify', you will get an entire list of ALL forums in the system, in a format that is quite easy to read and follow. But I would want all the extraneous stuff (order, edit, remove, etc.) taken out, and the actual forums and links exported to an HTML formatted text file. Since I may be making changes in the future, this is a function that I may need to use several times, so doing this all manually would be a royal pain.

I have already plugged in a link into my admin menu and found the code (displayforums) that does this function, but I am short on time to spend on this. I am perfectly willing to pay someone to help me out with this so I can get this done while I actually work on restructuring my message board.

Oh yeah, if someone wanted to get fancy and have this table of contents be a real time display to show the reader which forums have new messages since their last visit, that would be GREAT! But I would settle for plain vanilla now and add the cherries and sprinkles at a later date.

Thanks.