XF 2.2 Creating a portal page with article forums?

[Mouth]

Starting with XF 2.2 you can very easily create your own portal using article forums

Is there a guide for achieving this?
Searching HYS forum with 'portal' keyword only revealed a couple of recent xF2.2 results suggesting an add-on requirement.

 

[Kevin]

Is there a guide for achieving this?
Searching HYS forum with 'portal' keyword only revealed a couple of recent xF2.2 results suggesting an add-on requirement.

There's a new "Search forum" widget in 2.2... it's a round-about way but you can create a new Search Forum node, hide it from displaying, and then create a new Search forum widget. Between the node options and the widget options it becomes really flexible in what threads should be shown.

The output though is still presented as standard discussion threads; at least as of the moment there is no option for displaying the results with the same options as a dedicated Articles node.

 

[Mouth]

Between the node options and the widget options it becomes really flexible

Yeah, search forums can be very powerful indeed.

new "Search forum" widget in 2.2

It's a little confusing. If the search forum max results > widget max entries, does the widget display random or first x results?

as of the moment there is no option for displaying the results with the same options as a dedicated Articles node.

Yeah, hence why I'm intrigued by Chris' comment about creating a portal from Article forums. Wondering if it's more than just pointing the Index Page Route at an Article node (which I wouldn't consider as being a portal)

 

[Chromaniac]

search forums cannot appear in article node view so even if you create a search node for only articles from multiple forums (iirc brogan confirmed that in one of the threads)... you would get a plain forum view on that search forum. so that does not help in getting a portal view with articles from multiple sections on the forum

 

[Chris D]

Wondering if it's more than just pointing the Index Page Route at an Article node (which I wouldn't consider as being a portal)

This is what I was referring to. Many would consider this to be a portal. It seems to fit in with what the potential customer was expecting too. He specifically mentioned "news feature" which is generally pulling threads from a specific forum.

A Search forums widget would work too but they don't have the "Preview" format of the article forums (like the HYS forum). But they do have the "Expanded" view which is basically similar to this:

Home

www.valvetime.co.uk

Which notably can also be achieved in XF 2.1 with a page node and "Latest posts" widget pulling from one or more forums. Search forums give more flexibility though.

Some people prefer the idea as a portal being "featured" threads or promoted threads. That can be done with Search forums as you could just have an admin-only usable prefix called "Featured" and apply that to any threads which you want to be featured. You can then use a Search forum to find all threads with that prefix and then use a widget to display them on your home page or wherever.