[Topic Prefix Feature] Prefix drop-down selection menu in viewforum

[tomy91]

Hello, I'm using your great modification for topic prefixing and it's very useful, but I've found that there's a need for some new features in the future releases!

First feature could be very useful in almost every forum that uses prefixes: Prefix selection drop-down list in "viewforum.php" where you can select specific prefix and it will show only topics with prefix you selected from the list. It could be a killer-feature because it would let users to see only topics what they want.
For example the prefixes are different languages (english, french, german). A user speaking french opens the specific forum and sees a bunch of topics in english, french and german, but as he knows only french, he finds the drop-down menu, selects french from the list, and then only topics with french prefixes are visible.

Also this feature could be included in search results that user can select only results with specific prefix!

Thanks, hope you understand what I wanted to say (my english isn't the best) and hope that you could add this feature in next releases! :)

[tomy91]

I can help you a bit theoretically, practically I will try to do it myself but I'm not very experienced in PHP :D

SELECT * FROM phpbb_tmm_prefixes_applied WHERE prefix_id = 1;

[imkingdavid]

Hi

I have been considering this feature for a while, but haven't really had any success in implementing given the way topics are fetched and displayed from the database. To do this requires even further edits in the viewforum.php file, and my goal is to make as few edits as possible.

To implement this, I need a query to pull all of the prefixes allowed in the current forum for the dropdown. Then, I need to add a way to handle providing a prefix ID via the URL or via the dropdown. Using that prefix, I would need to query the topics table for a list of topic ids that are within the given forum and which have the selected prefix id applied, which requires two queries more.

So yes, it's doable in theory, but I don't know how high on the priority list it is.

Anyway, thanks for the request and it is under consideration.

[tomy91]

Yeah, but maybe it's easier to add a new row for prefix ids in phbb_topics table insted of phpbb_prefixes table. It will allow to make queries like the phpbb default in the bottom of viewforum page?

[imkingdavid]

Having the row on the topics table makes it more difficult to allow multiple prefixes on topics, though.

[tomy91]

Maybe you could figure something out of this: http://return-true.com/2011/01/store-multiple-values-in-a-single-row-mysql-revisited/

serialize() and unserialize() in php manual.

Also an easier option is to add multiple rows in phpbb_topics table (prefix_1; prefix_2......).

Hope you can and want to improve your mod like this :)

[imkingdavid]

That's a fair point; I hadn't really thought about serializing the array, though it does seem like a better way of doing it than having a whole table for associating the topic with the prefix.

I'll consider it and see if there are any drawbacks to that as a solution and may work that in in the next release, hopefully since I've minimized the code in core files to mostly functions such a thing won't require too many edits.

Of course, there is the issue of migrating the prefixes that are already in use from the one table to the new row that would be created.

Anyway, thanks for the idea.

[imkingdavid]

BTW, I marked this for 1.1.0, the next feature release.

[tomy91]

Great if You could do that :) Looking forward to the next release! :)