I thank you for considering suggestions
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I think there is a misunderstanding here. I don't want it to become a "directory" addon, I was just trying to describe "dependable" by giving an example, in this case I chose the directory structure of amazon, but I wasn't trying to turn it into a directory addon.
Let's say we have a forum about anything and a forum-category is called "books".
And custom fields would be used to describe the characteristics, such as "publisher", "release date", "author", "language", etc. and specially "genre/type".
We don't want to create for every genre a subforum, cause imagine there can be hundreds of "types". You don't want to fill your forum category structure with tens or hundreds of subforums. You just want 1 "books" section, where custom fields deals with the rest. Maybe for books this might be only 20-30, we could have created subforums, but for example for car models/parts there could be hundreds of types.
So now I would pick from our "books" section the dependable dropdown field "genre". We can pick "Thriller", "Sci-fi", "Adventure", "Children", "Food", "Novels", "Academic", "School", "Language learning" etc.
I'd choose "Sci-Fi" and the next dropdown would occur which is dependable and in this case we could pick from "Space Travel", "Time Travel", "Aliens", "Futuristic", "Apocalyptic". I'd choose "Aliens".
Now another dependable could occur and list me the type of Aliens etc. You see I could go on and on.
Or instead of picking "Sci-Fi", I could have picked "Food". Now the dependable dropdown would list me cultures "Italian", "French", "Chinese" etc.
And then afterwards Ingredients or something.
You see the system can be very powerful. I could go into the book section and specifically find the type of book I want very easily.
Another good example would be a "country->city" one. I mean specially for a classified section it would be nice to be able to pick quickly. Nobody wants to create 200 subforums for every country. It would be much easier to have a dependable dropdown, where I could choose the country and afterwards the city and see what offers are there for my city.
This kind of examples can be made for literally any type of forum.
I hope I could explain what I meant and hopefully make it clear why it would be important.
That is the addon I was talking about,
click.
And in case you have the time or will to create a real directory addon, this kind of structure would be the best,
click.
It would be nice to have this kind of page as a the landing page, instead of a portal or whatever CMS system is there. But this kind of directory addon, also integrated into threads, would be much work. With Custom Fields we kind of can realize a directory structure, just 1 missing feature would be dependant dropdowns as I tried to explain. In both cases actually, a real directory addon or the custom fields solution, both need dependable dropdowns if you want a serious database.
