Lack of interest Prefixes

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What prefixes are you talking about? Do you mean the database prefix (e.g. “xf_”) which is intentionally once per table?
 
You use
XF
RM
PM (soon with prefixes :)
QB
Links
more?

and for all of them you have to add prefixes.

In the next step you connect them to threads, resources, products, quotes

It would much easier to have one big table.
Add the prefixes once instead of x times and have the same ID everywhere.

Then it would be easy to say:

Have a resource? Want a thread? Nice! Add a thread and set thread_prefix_id = resource_prefix_id
This is something you can do now only, if you're very consequent when adding new prefixes.

But i was ...Now I cant do that:

res cat has ten prefixes, forum has the same ten prefixes:
but because cat.res_prefix_id is normally not the same like forum.thread_prefix_id, we have to edit them manually all the time.

One solution for that could be something like:

Take all res_prefix_ids and change them to the value of the thread_prefix_ids, changing them in cats/resources ...
With such a script, it is not written now, it would be easy (after running it) to add this thread_prefix_id = resource_prefix_id ...

Another solution could be
take res_prefix_id, fetch name, check names in thread_prefixes, fetch thread_prefix_id ...
But this add-on is not written as well ... but it is on my list.
 
That sort of presumes you want to use the same prefixes across them… that surely isn’t the case for all users, and I’d expect the technical effort requirement of changing that to be quite high for comparatively little reward - not saying you wouldn’t behefit but I feel like there are more useful things to do ahead of that.
 
It's MUCH easier to keep up with prefixes for each individual add-on.
In fact, I need different prefixes in the following:
Forum
Resource Manager
Media Gallery
ShowCase
AMS
Link Directory
Classifieds
Reviews

It would be a literal nightmare trying to maintain ALL of those under one mass setting. For maintaining them, it is (for me) easier to go into the appropriate add-on segment and modify/add the prefixes there. There is less chance of mistakes being made... and for several of my add-ons, I use the SAME term, but style them differently....
 
Having a uniform id number across all add-ons would be very useful for me.

It would be nice if there was one central table, but you could assign them to different schemas. Maybe something as simple as an addon just adding a new "addon_enabled" column to the prefix table.
 
master_table with prefix_id auto
plus phrases

thread_table
prefix_id, css, display_order

resource_table
prefix_id, css, display_order

would solve all problems, right?
 
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It would solve your problem. So far not seeing the solution for anyone who wants different prefixes in different areas of the site.
 
If you want that prefix in each area, yes. The key point is that not everyone wants the same prefixes for everything so if you are going to have one master list internally, you need to track which areas these are relevant to - since forum prefixes definitely won’t be the same as RM prefixes or MG prefixes for other people.

I would probably even go as far as suggesting that your requirements for one true list of prefixes are the outlier, not the other way around.
 
since forum prefixes definitely won’t be the same as RM prefixes or MG prefixes for other people.
On the contrary I use the exact same for all of them, so have to code other add-ons to link them all together.

If you run a gaming website for example, you might have a prefix for each game. It would be great to be able to search everything with this single prefix.
 
It would be great to be able to search everything with this single prefix.
This is a fault with the advanced search though. You can specify a prefix (that may be common to several forums) and you can specify to search in all forums but it won't perform the search without a keyword or member also as criteria.

This is odd to me because the capability must exist because you can create a search forum based on a prefix that is is in several forums.
 
The difference is that prefixes are scoped to a module, not solely to a forum board; so prefixes are forum prefixes or RM prefixes or MG prefix or (insert other addon here) prefixes.

I get there is absolutely a case where some users will want global prefixes that are the same across all systems, but there are absolutely people don’t want this behaviour. And while I can see both sides have a valid argument, everything I’ve seen about how prefixes get used (not just in XF land) is that prefixes are more likely to be more useful if they are per-module - I would not expect for most sites that the prefixes used in the forum would apply to, say, gallery content or RM content, and equally vice versa.

This is not to say you don’t have a valid use case - you do - but that you are the minority and forcing everyone else to adopt your world view is a huge problem, because that workflow breaks everyone else’s setup while you can get by (if inconveniently) not having it that way.

If it were implemented I’d want to delineate between global and forum prefixes so that global prefixes can be used everywhere and forum prefixes stay in the forum - but then you have to deal with gallery prefixes, RM prefixes etc etc. It’s a lot of work to redo. I think it could be powerful as long as both setups can be supported.
 
This is not to say you don’t have a valid use case - you do - but that you are the minority and forcing everyone else to adopt your world view is a huge problem, because that workflow breaks everyone else’s setup while you can get by (if inconveniently) not having it that way.
@Robert9 idea solves this and doesn't break any workflow, it's actually pretty genius.
 
This is a fault with the advanced search though. You can specify a prefix (that may be common to several forums) and you can specify to search in all forums but it won't perform the search without a keyword or member also as criteria.

This is odd to me because the capability must exist because you can create a search forum based on a prefix that is is in several forums.

Just use Xon's addon and make sure the "Allow empty search" option is checked:

 
Just use Xon's addon and make sure the "Allow empty search" option is checked:

I don't really need it myself, I was just answering @benFF
 
@Robert9 idea solves this and doesn't break any workflow, it's actually pretty genius.
How, though? What I see is that you end up with a global list of prefixes without any way to identify which parts of the system it should apply to. Yes, he connects things up, but there's no ability to say 'use this prefix in forum, MG' and 'use this prefix in forum, MG, RM' which is vital to people.

And that's before we talk about the changes to across not only the core, but RM, MG, plus all other mods, plus the very manual step of reclassifying everything which for some is a momentous task. Or, you end up cloning all prefixes into this one master list so you can manually deduplicate them - for any sizeable established site this is a monstrous task.

Consider, for example, how many threads would need changing here because the prefixes are different - unless we want the 'Not a bug' and 'Lack of interest' prefixes over in the RM and the 'Unmaintained' prefix over in the forum... going to be a lot of fun for admins to have to deal with that.
 
How, though?
You would create the xfrm and xfmg gallery prefixes in the same way as normal, except instead of a text box for the name, you'd just choose from a drop-down list (which lists all the globals)

Database wise nothing would need to change at all, the id would simply be the same as the global one.
 
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