Design flaw in Robin Sowell's automatic forum_fill? How do I fix?
Development and Programming
This post follows up on part of a longer post to which no one responded, because now I am convinced that the extension has a design flaw that ought to be a problem for just about everybody.
Here’s the problem that I see. The automatic forum_fill achieves the task of automatically creating a forum topic when a new weblog entry is created. That’s very helpful. However, there appears to be a design flaw (or a misconception on my part) in that it does this for all statuses of an new entry. So if I set a status to Draft of Review or simply use the Quick Save feature while posting it does the same thing, effectively eliminating the use of any editorial work flow AND eliminating the ability to use future dates for weblog entries.
As I see it, the extension needs to be modified so that it only creates Forum Topic ID’s when the Status is set to OPEN. This is critical.
Also, a way needs to be devised to not create the forum topic (or not have it appear) until the date/time that the weblog entry appears (it needs to handle future dates).
Any help on these (and the items in my earlier post mentioned above) would be greatly appreciated.
There isn’t a way to set the forum date in the future- it’s not designed for that and the publish page is hard coding it, so there’s not a lot that simple extension can do about it. You could add a conditional in to have it not publish to the forum if the status isn’t open, but you’d need to do the customization yourself.
For future entries, I’d probably run a cron to add them, something along those lines. But it would have to be custom. There’s no real way to easily tweak the extension to do it.
You could add a conditional in to have it not publish to the forum if the status isn’t open, but you’d need to do the customization yourself.
Thanks, Robin for your reply. I can’t imagine why someone would want to create a forum topic for a weblog entry that is not to be posted yet, but I am sure someone else can.
I posted this originally on the how-to section because I don’t know PHP and so don’t know how to code the conditional I need. I know the logic is “If status is OPEN, then do all that follows.” So the conditional must be pretty simple. Is there any one who can tell me how to code a conditional in PHP for this?