WSN Forum

Using Personal List for Saved Topics

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:20:13 GMT

Normally, you would use Admin -> Settings -> Switches -> Saved Topics to allow members to save their favorite topics. Sometimes, however, this might be inadequate. Suppose you want to allow them to sort the topics into subforums, or you want to allow them to both save existing topics and create their own unique topics that are in their list alone (and you don't want these to be separate lists). For these purposes, we can adapt Admin -> Settings -> Switches -> Personal List instead.

In normal use, the personal list allows submitting their own unique topics to their list (the list is a menu item in their member home area) but doesn't allow saving topics from elsewhere. To enable the saving to personal list, go to Admin -> Themes -> Manage Templates -> Topic Bit and add this at your desired location (say just before the </td> at the end):

<IF {THISMEMBERISREGISTERED}>
<IF not {LINKISINMYALBUMS}>
<IF {TID} does not contain albums>
<form action="https://scripts.webmastersite.net/wsnforum/manual/albums.php?add={LINKID}" method="post">
Add to <select name="subalbumid">{THISMEMBERALBUMLIST}</select>
<input type="submit" value="Add" >
</form>
</IF>
<ELSE>
<a href="albums.php?todo=remove&linkid={LINKID}&catid={LINKOURALBUMCATID}">Remove from personal list</a>
</IF>
</IF>

Now your members can easily add/remove from their personal list from anywhere on the site. Alternatively, you might prefer to put the above code in the topic details template instead of the topic bit if you only want it shown on the details page.

Display Topics From Subforums in Top Level

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:11:32 GMT

Sometimes, you want to make everyone submit to a subforum on your site and not to a main forum. That leaves the main forum blank except for the subforum links. Perhaps you'd like to use that space to display all the topics from the subforums (and subforums of subforums, etc). That way, viewing the top level forum shows the visitor an unfiltered list of everything in the forum while clicking on a subforum filters to that subforum.

You can do this by going to Admin Panel -> Forums -> Forum Settings and setting "Display Topics From Subforums in Top Level Forums" to "yes". When this is turned on, the top level forums will become essential search-based forums displaying topics from their descendants. Submission to top level forums will be automatically forbidden the same as if Admin Panel -> Topics -> Topic Settings -> "Disallow Submissions to the top _ levels" were set to 1.

Restrict Forum to Particular Users

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 20:00:45 GMT

Suppose you want to allow a specific group of users to access particular forums, while forbidding everyone else from those forums.

For example purposes, we'll say the people you want to allow are called 'customers'. Create a 'customers' usergroup at Admin Panel -> Members -> Manage Usergroups (just use the same permissions as regular members unless you want different). Move the desired members to that usergroup by editing their profiles. Then, edit the specific forums you have in mind (either through Admin Panel -> Forums -> Bulk Edit or visiting the forum and clicking edit in the editorial controls area). On the edit forum page, there's a "Display forum permissions for editing" link near the bottom. Click that to expand that area. Then select "no" for "Can view forum?" for the guest and member usergroups, "yes" (or leaving as the default would work too) for the customers group. You now have a forum that can only be viewed by customers.

Site Details

Sun, 10 May 2009 08:45:32 GMT

The site details section at Admin Panel -> Settings -> System Configuration asks for details about the site you're using WSN as a part of. The URL you should supply here is the main website URL where an inbound link from a link partner should go, if it differs from the installation URL. WSN might be installed at www.yoursite.com/wsn/, but you'd type www.yoursite.com here to indicate your main site.

The title would be the title you want your link partners to link to -- so, "Your Site" instead of "Your Site's Directory". This will be the default title for the directory too until you specify the directory title at Admin -> Customizations -> Page TItles.

The description should also be what you'd want a link partner to use.

The title and description will be used in the RSS feed by default. You can edit the RSS Feed template (Admin Panel -> Themes -> Manage Templates) to change that to something else.

Guest Page Cache System

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:17:25 GMT

Warning: The guest page cache system will cause those not logged in to not see a current version of your site. It is therefore only useful for sites where the content hardly ever changes.

The guest page cache system, which you can turn on at Admin Panel -> Miscellaneous -> Advanced Options, allows your pages to load faster by caching a copy of what the page looks like. This means that you should only use the cache if there's a single way you want each page to look to all people who aren't logged in. If you have multiple template sets or multiple languages you want to let people choose among, you will not want to use the cache. Keep in mind that WSN already caches some slow queries and toplists automatically and you should only consider this cache system if your pages are too slow or server load too high.

If your site doesn't get a lot of non-guest traffic, you'll need to set up a helper cron to ensure that timed tasks still all get performed.

After submissions are made it automatically updates the cache of the destination page, but it cannot update any pages that for example might include a toplist which does or should reference the updated/new page. Please note that the cache can use up huge amounts of disk space on a large site. If you have 500 forums and 15,000 topics, it could take a gigabyte to fully cache. The total cache size will be bytes-per-page * number-of-pages * number-of-usergroups-cached. If your space is limited you can set a limit on the total size in your cache settings, but the smaller you make this value the more often slow uncached pages will be served.

After making template changes or the like you may wish to reset the cache, by clicking the "empty cache now" link on the advanced options page.

The cache system excludes the admin panel, plus anything under these files on the user-side: edit.php profile.php privatemessaging.php buddylist.php online.php 2checkout.php paypal.php nochex.php activate.php upgrade.php setup.php attachimport.php chat.php im.php in.php modcp.php newposts.php savedtopics.php searchips.php securityimage.php revisepost.php addpoll.php invites.php