Any way to improve the publishing user experience ?

[OliverWilbur]

Hello,

I have setup a paid icloud setup. I like the software a lot. At least the community part. I think it's unbeatable. The amount of feature integration is amazing.
However, I have  a problem with the "publishing" experience aspect of the product.

I know it is mainly a community suite, but I expected more in the publishing aspect.

My basic need: get a custom page with a feed from a blog or forums. I wanted in this feed to display not only posts titles, but as well as content of articles with images. This is basically what you can do in any wordpress or any publishing suite. I can't with ipb. For example a blog feed, each post is curiously prematurely truncated. I can't control where to truncate. This create a feed that is not engaging.
For forum topics I had to hack a custom php block because the built in feed carries not only the topic, but all its answers. So on a feed I have all the unwanted answers to the topics. The result is really ugly: all I wanted was to feature a topic, but it gets burried on user answers that I didn't choose to feature.

Am I missing something or it is really not possible to have:

- Feed of first topics (or blog) without answers, but with content, and decide where to truncate ?

Are things improved in 4.2 ?

[xtech]

You can do that with custom blocks, if you are handy at programming PHP and HTML.

[clearvision]

If you have the pages app you can add topic content for the first post in the topic feed by adding something like:

<p class='ipsType_medium ipsType_richText ipsContained ipsSpacer_bottom ipsSpacer_half' data-ipsTruncate data-ipsTruncate-size='8 lines' data-ipsTruncate-type='remove'>
	{$topic->truncated()|raw}
</p>

into the template for the topic feed block.  You would have to play around with the default template a bit to make it look how you want and deal with both vertical and horizontal block formats (note the horizontal part of the template calls a default topic template so you would have to replace that with code similar to the vertical part of the template).

Also note the truncate part which is likely similar code used in the blog feed, etc. and you can adjust the truncate length by modifying the template.

Once again this is using custom page block feeds not the default system feeds, but most of the work is done for you.