Sub forum styling help required please!

[RobinHood]

Howdy folks,

I need a bit of help styling my subforums.

On my site I've got a few different categories, most of these have one main 'general' forum for that category, within that forum there are lots of sub forums.

My problem is that then people click on the main forum in the category, all of the subforums are displayed on one line each before you see any of the threads for the general forum. This is waaay too many.

I've identified a few possible way of trying to fix this, which I could do with some help on how to execute.

1. Do something like Jaxel has on his site where the subforums are styled and listed in a condensed fashion at the top like this:



I've used Jaxel's tutorial for sub forum grid listing on my main forum view, as outlined here, but the thread is now closed and I imagine he's pretty busy as he's not responded to a request to re-post it as a resource yet unfortunately.

2. Remove the entire section of the page that list all the subforums, using the Chrome inspector I've identified that deleting <ol class="nodeList sectionMain" id="forums"> removes it from the page, but I'm not sure how to implement the page loading with this removed through css or otherwise?

3. This is probably my most preferred solution due to some categories having so many subforums beneath the main general forum. This possibility is to removing the entire section as described in point 2. But replacing it with the <div class="nodeInfo forumNodeInfo primaryContent "> element (as identified in chrome inspector) from the main forum view. Here's the image of what I'm talking about:




This way people still have access to the drop down sub forum box enabling potentially quick navigation to a relevant sub forum if necessary.

Any help, ideas or suggestion would be appreciated!

 

[Andy.N]

I asked this same question before and according to Jake Bunce, it's not possible without an addon. I wonder if Jaxel used an addon for this forum listing
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/how-to-display-subforums-in-grids.22870/

 

[RobinHood]

Hmm....that's unfortunate.

Even if I can't get it styled like Jaxel's site there must be some way I can clean it up by executing option 2 or 3 through css or template edits perhaps? Ideally I'd like to not have to resort to template edits, but having a list of 74 sub forums as in the example in my OP really isn't going to work. I'll ask Jake if he's got any ideas.

 

[Jake Bunce]

Maybe this?

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/fix-of-embedded-categories.229/

 

[guiltar]

If you want to condense the list of subforums, look at the template forum_view. It contains

<xen:if is="{$renderedNodes}">
    <xen:include template="ad_forum_view_above_node_list" />
    <xen:include template="node_list" />
</xen:if>

So if you want to make node list more compact, you have to replace this part (or create template modification) by something like that

<xen:if is="{$renderedNodes}<3">
    <xen:include template="ad_forum_view_above_node_list" />
    <xen:include template="node_list" />
<xen:elseif is="{$renderedNodes}"/>
    <xen:include template="ad_forum_view_above_node_list" />
    <xen:include template="node_list_compact" />
</xen:if>

Here node_list_compact is the template that you have to create and customize to get the block like in first picture.

 

[RobinHood]

Maybe this?

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/fix-of-embedded-categories.229/

Thanks Jake, unfortunately that mod wasn't applicable to my situation, but it did put me in touch with guiltar

Snip

Thank you guiltar! I will look into this today!

 

[RobinHood]

That worked a treat guiltar! For now I've just removed the node_list so the threads in the general forum are immediately viewable without having to scroll past anything.
It now looks like this:



Ideally I'd like to now somehow insert the drop down sub-forums list from the forum_list view as in the mockup below:



Any ideas on how I might be able to do this?

 

[guiltar]

The nodes already rendered before they are passed in template.
So if you want to restrict only by template editing, you can either move node_list below threads or try to use custom css to make it compact.