Three very important questions for me as I steer my cruiseliner of a VB3.8 + GARS + PhotoPost forum towards VB4 or an alternative in the future.
Firstly* will VB4 have a way to allow blog posts to have a "read more" style functionality (where the author can determine the exact place to split the post into a teaser and the full article)? Currently blog in VB3.8 does a nasty "chop" at the number of characters defined in the blog admin screen* and doesn't appear to have this functionality. Looking at pages like http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/blog.php it would seem this functionality exists as your blog posts are nicely chopped off at an appropriate point* but I don't think I can test the blog functionality without installing VB4 locally to determine this.
Secondly* does VB4 allow linking of other content/custom fields to articles? I'm about to embark on a very ambitious membership-created-articles project using GARS. GARS has a very useful feature called "Modules" (Tutorial 101* 102) which essentially allows custom fields for articles. I am using these fields to allow an article to have a list of links* a list of specific related articles* a list of specific related threads* and shortly lists of other related data. These "related data" and "related content" lists appear in sideboxes next to the article* and at the end of the article. The article (id) is the common link between all the otherwise disparate pieces of information.
Being able to link articles to multiple other forms of content is going to be critical to my long term plan. I don't think it's a particularly strange request or need - you see blogs and articles all over the net doing this kind of thing (eg: techcrunch links a blog post with the bio of any companies discussed in the blog post). Does VB4 allow this kind of association between articles and other content? I am a decent PHP/MySQL programmer - would it be hard to implement it?
Lastly* what form internally do VB4 articles* blogs* and posts take? Are they all really "posts" using BBcode as the formatting? Do they all live in the posts table or does each content type have its own table in the database?
Thank you sincerely in advance for any insight you can give me as I weigh up whether to wait for VB4 or lock myself into GARS which might make future upgrading the VB4 problematic or impossible.
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11-22-2009, 10:20 AM
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