Anyone using Article thread type for Classifieds? Custom fields...

beerForo

Well-known member
My thinking is article-type in preview mode
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Custom fields
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A possible solution to classifieds

Has anyone tried something similar?
 
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The add-on is a bit much in cost for our limited use, but it is a great idea. Going to bookmark it for future reference.

I may use the article type for our Classifieds but will use a standard forum listing vs. the preview.
 
Yes the article image + custom fields is the idea. The preview mode would be good if your classifieds rely on imagery. The add-on gives it an eBay type sort.

I think it is very viable, add-on or not!

Nothing fancy like closing times or ratings, but for those that already use forums for classifieds successfuly, I think it can really enhance the experience.
 
FYI guests see the button to leave feedback :)

Thanks for the link. Adds even more to the DIY Classifieds!
 
Nothing fancy like closing times or ratings, but for those that already use forums for classifieds successfuly, I think it can really enhance the experience.
We've used a trader ratings add-on since our days on vBulletin. Members seem to like it and thanks to our community, there are almost no neutral or negative ratings. We're making changes to Classifieds when we do our next upgrade where ads will expire in 30 days, and only the thread starter can reply to the thread. We had too many members bumping up an ad multiple times per day with inane comments. We're also opening up post editing privileges for the thread starter so they can maintain their ad, where we do not do that now. Some are going to complain that they can't reply in-thread with questions, or to get their name in first on an offer. But in our forum niche, there are online listing sites out there that sort by the time the ad was posted, expire ads after 45 days or more, and require buyers to contact sellers privately. So it's no different.

It'll be interesting to see what we all come up with in terms of using the Article thread type for Classifieds.

@JoyFreak, do you think there will be much of a performance hit from loading all of those images? I only wonder if mobile users might experience lagging while pages loads. But it just looks so much better!
 
We've used a trader ratings add-on since our days on vBulletin. Members seem to like it and thanks to our community, there are almost no neutral or negative ratings. We're making changes to Classifieds when we do our next upgrade where ads will expire in 30 days, and only the thread starter can reply to the thread. We had too many members bumping up an ad multiple times per day with inane comments. We're also opening up post editing privileges for the thread starter so they can maintain their ad, where we do not do that now. Some are going to complain that they can't reply in-thread with questions, or to get their name in first on an offer. But in our forum niche, there are online listing sites out there that sort by the time the ad was posted, expire ads after 45 days or more, and require buyers to contact sellers privately. So it's no different.

It'll be interesting to see what we all come up with in terms of using the Article thread type for Classifieds.

@JoyFreak, do you think there will be much of a performance hit from loading all of those images? I only wonder if mobile users might experience lagging while pages loads. But it just looks so much better!
Not at all. I use the same layout for my articles. No lag. You can remove the image if you wanted to or there’s various ways you can prevent from performance issue. Lower the amount of articles displayed per page. Use a cache provider. 2.2 lazy load image is handy and a bunch of other stuff you can do to minimise all that.
 
Has anyone tried something similar?
Interesting idea. 😎 At the moment we're using Snog's 'advanced forms' add-on for the creation of buy/sell threads but at some point in the future will be moving over to using XF's custom fields (we under utilize the add-on, really, so it wouldn't be a major change). I just switched the node type to 'articles' to see what it'd look like and, not bad really. https://cameraderie.org/forums/buy-sell-trade.27/

My 'first reaction' thoughts....
  • I changed the phrase view_full_article value to just "View full" instead of "View full article". I'm starting to use the XF 'article' view for a view different purposes other than "articles" so changing the phrase made sense for me.
  • Out of the box, stickied threads are also stickied when shown in the article view node listing. I need to look around to see if there is a way of preventing that (or perhaps showing stickied threads differently in the listing rather than as an "article").
This is now prompting me to really spend the time to get something going for having a default image shown in the article view if there's no images in the first post. :D
 
This is now prompting me to really spend the time to get something going for having a default image shown in the article view if there's no images in the first post.

Like this?
 
Like this?
Yep :) What I was looking at was to extend the getCoverImage function so that if no image is returned then it'd use a default image. I just haven't had time to work on it yet. To go with the KISS philsophy I figure the main meta OG image would be a good candidate since nearly everybody would have that configured anyway.

If anybody else is interested, I submitted a suggestion for this.... :D
 
Yep :) What I was looking at was to extend the getCoverImage function so that if no image is returned then it'd use a default image. I just haven't had time to work on it yet. To go with the KISS philsophy I figure the main meta OG image would be a good candidate since nearly everybody would have that configured anyway.

If anybody else is interested, I submitted a suggestion for this.... :D
You can do this with a simple template edit. I can run through it with you, it's very easy.
 
You can do this with a simple template edit. I can run through it with you, it's very easy.
Yep, I'm just trying to make it a universal solution so by extending the function then it makes it a bit future-proof if the templates change. Plus then I could keep extending on to the code logic as needed/wanted for other endeavors.
 
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