Single statuses viewable directly from widget

[Dreadknux]

In IPB3, the status system was, for the most part, self-contained within its sidebar widget. The widget would show the latest statuses and a couple of comments underneath each, with an Ajax link to add the rest of the comments and a simple form to add a comment underneath. While the IPB3 system was simplistic and mildly buggy (accented characters breaking Ajax, anyone?) it was really efficient from a UX standpoint. When we updated to IPS4, one of the biggest complaints we had from our users was that statuses were treated almost like topics - you can see (part of) the status itself, but you have to load a new page to see comments or reply. For our users who were used to doing everything through the homepage, it was a big difference, and it massively reduced the volume of status activity on our board.

My suggestion is to code in some way to interact with a status directly from the widget, without having to load a new page. We developed a plugin to do this in the simplest way (not saying it's the right way!) we could - it converts the permalinks under the status into an Ajax ipsDialog link to the single status. It's a bit messy, and there's a hack in the single status page that I think reuses official code, so I don't think I can repost it, but it works well for us. I think something like this would be a really good core feature for IPS, and (at least the way we did it) it's not difficult to implement.

[Hunter Lyons]

[This is somewhat off topic but it's a fix for some of your problems. I'm unsure IPS will change their status updates anytime soon.]

I highly suggest the Advanced Status Updates Widget. For me at least, it helped very much with some of the default's issues. It's a bit odd to pay $15 just for statuses, but it's worth it, in my honest opinion. If you wanna see it live- here's my forums and it's currently installed there!

It adds likes, replies are much easier, and a lot of it is done just on the page with the widget itself. It looks a lot better and embeds work in it too - images, links, media embeds [YouTube, etc]. Also, it Paginates statuses! [When more than whatever you set to show are made, it makes more pages with the rest]. 

[Dreadknux]

Ah didn't realise there was already a plugin option