[pmwiki-users] Adding a Reply Count to SimpleForum Cookbook

[DaveG]

Just thought I'd share how I've implemented the Cookbook/SimpleForum. 
Each page has a tabbed link to a discussion page, which also includes a 
count of the number of posts on the page. For a sample refer to 
http://mr2wiki.com/Main/TopicRequests.

Each page has a tabbed Discuss link. This points to a page in the group 
Forum named "Group-Pagename". The Discuss tab is replaced with a Return 
tab when viewing the Forum to allow the user to return to the base page.

Here's what I did:

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1] Setup SimpleForum. I've defined Forum.GroupFooter to contain:
    [[<<]]
    (:commentboxchrono:)

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2] Change your skin template to include a link to the Discussion forum. 
I changed my skin to include a tabbed link to a 'discussion' forum page.

My skin .tmpl has:
    <!--function:DisplayDiscuss-->

------------------
3] Add functions to create the link to the discussion page, and count 
the posts in the discussion page. The count is based on the number of 
times the markup ">>messagehead<<" occurs on the page.

I created a two functions in my skin .php file:
    function FindInPage($pagename,$find) {
       $p = ReadPage($pagename, READPAGE_CURRENT);
       return substr_count($p['text'], $find);
    }

    function DisplayDiscuss($x) {
       global $ScriptUrl;
       $Group = FmtPageName('$Group',$x);
       $Page  = FmtPageName('$Name',$x);
       if ($Group=='Forum') {
          $BasePage = explode('-',$Page,2);
          $html = "<a \n id='return' 
href='$ScriptUrl/".$BasePage[0]."/".$BasePage[1]."'>return</a>\n";
       } else {
          $html = "<a \n id='discuss' 
href='$ScriptUrl/Forum/$Group-$Page'>discuss 
(".FindInPage("Forum/$Group-$Page",'>>messagehead<<').")</a>\n";
       }
       echo $html;
       return;
    };


That's it!


  ~ ~ Dave