Topic: Important Topics - or - Announcements Block

[cloksin]

I'd like to see a block that has a list of topics that are controlled by the admins.  In the settings for the block the admin could put the id # of the topics they would like to be displayed.  The display would be similar to the Recent Topics block where the title of the topic, the topic starter, the time the topic was started, and the board the topic are in are displayed, and nothing else.

[AngelinaBelle]

Have you considered using articles for this purpose?

[cloksin]

How exactly would that work?

[ccbtimewiz]

http://simpleportal.net/index.php?action=docs;area=setup_articles

Articles are specially-chosen topic posts can appear on the Portal page or in an articles block.

[cloksin]

ok, wow, I never knoew the articles could work that way.  It'd be nice to see the other info, like the board the article is, and the author, but this will do for my needs, thanks so much.

[cloksin]

One more question, is there any way to indicate within the articles block when there have been new posts made to the topics that have been added as articles?

My site is a RP site, and we frequently have social events, I want to be able to place a social event thread as an article so all my members can see it, but it would be nice if the little "new" flag was there to let people know when a new post was made, instead of having to click through to it all the time.

Also, on a thread with multiple pages, it would be nice to have the page numbers listed there as well, so you could just go to the last page, or if you didn't read through all the pages, you could click on the number of the page you left off at.

[AngelinaBelle]

The articles feature is designed to work with New Topics.
So to use it, each announcement/article would be made in a new topic, anywhere in your forum.

If you are currently adding announcements to an existing topic, this will not be compatable with the SimplePortal articles feature.

[cloksin]

Any solutions then to get it to do what I want?

[AngelinaBelle]

One solution is to simply make new announcements as individual topics, so that they may be added as articles.

I have not yet seen the newest articles features in simpleportal 2.3.4
I know that articles COULD work with "any message" instead of just "topic posts", but this would take a lot of modification.
For myself, I am going to wait to see what 2.3.4 holds for us...