Categories for clubs

[mrbowers]

Hello, would be nice to build "Categories" for clubs. Instead of throwing it all in one area.

[Jimi Wikman]

Agreed.

[Adriano Faria]

This is very requested. Somehow they opted to use custom fields to “separate” clubs.

[PacmanDo]

Maybe they will add it later. Need something to help with organisation that's easy to do.

[Joel R]

This was requested ever since Clubs was introduced in 4.2.  

IPS told us the their recommended workaround is to use custom fields.  You would create a custom field, define the field for each club, and users can sort by it.  In theory, I agree that this is a more open-ended and flexible system.  In practice, I think IPS will hear this suggestion for the rest of time until they build in categories ... 

 

[PacmanDo]

 

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

This was requested ever since Clubs was introduced in 4.2.  

IPS told us the their recommended workaround is to use custom fields.  You would create a custom field, define the field for each club, and users can sort by it.  In theory, I agree that this is a more open-ended and flexible system.  In practice, I think IPS will hear this suggestion for the rest of time until they build in categories ... 

 

How do users figure out how to simply sort for it?

[Joel R]

Once admins have the custom field setup, users will see a new "Sort By" option in their list of clubs. 

[Chosen1]

Count me in as someone that thinks clubs really needs categories.  I set up some custom fields to see how it works, and to determine if it could do what I would want from categories.

I have a gaming site.  If I enabled clubs on my site it would be so that people couple have a location for their games.  The primary custom field for me would be game, with the user selecting from a long list of games.  I setup a custom field with 20 options to mimic the categories that I would have.

Here is the screen shot from the sort option. This is a standard sort and didn't take my custom field into consideration.

 

And here is a screen shot from the filter button.  It displays a list of all of the options from my custom field.  There is no "select all" or "select none" option.  If the user wants to filter by a single game they would need to manually uncheck 19 boxes.

For my purposes the custom field doesn't seem to make much sense.  I currently have 153 games that are divided into roughly 35 categories.  Maybe if you only had 2 or 3 "categories" you could get away with it. 

Is there something that I am missing here?  If not, I'll reiterate what I stated at the beginning, count me in as someone that thinks clubs really needs categories.

I do want to add 1 additional finding after I originally wrote this post.  The clubs blocks also enables the filter.  So it does look possible to create your own categories and even display them on a sorted page if you can make a block for each category option.

 

 

[DesignzShop]

IPB already sells a forums application, why be redundant? Clubs wasn't designed or meant to have a replication of the full blown forums application.

I've belonged to a few clubs myself over the years and really none of them were big clubs (car clubs). So when clubs or groups meet they usually do it in one location. The one location here fits perfect the way I feel about the single club forum and personifies what a club is all about.

I also feel a single forum in the clubs case is best because it really does encourage posting. There's no rules or worries about where to post specific comments / topics , no searching for comments through countless amounts of forums and more, it's just quick, easy and convenient and filled with most current topics. Most clubs I've ever belonged too usually didn't have a geek like me in it and certainly most were pc illiterate unfortunately for the most part but... if they had a phone that was another issue which brings me to my next point - mobile. 

In mobile we want to make it easier for users to get what they want to interact as quick as possible without requirements / extra time of posting to a specific forum. I open my phone, find my club, hit the forum tab and walla, everything I need without the need to do more.

My post is just my opinion on my past club experiences so what I say may not apply to every situation but I feel would apply to most. Just my 2 cents here.

Regards

 

[Chosen1]

The main issue that I learned from setting up the custom fields is that it isn't really filterable if you have more than a few options.  Adding a "select all" or "select none" option would do a lot for the capabilities.

[Joel R]

3 hours ago, DesignzShop said:

IPB already sells a forums application, why be redundant? Clubs wasn't designed or meant to have a replication of the full blown forums application.

I've belonged to a few clubs myself over the years and really none of them were big clubs (car clubs). So when clubs or groups meet they usually do it in one location. The one location here fits perfect the way I feel about the single club forum and personifies what a club is all about.

I also feel a single forum in the clubs case is best because it really does encourage posting. There's no rules or worries about where to post specific comments / topics , no searching for comments through countless amounts of forums and more, it's just quick, easy and convenient and filled with most current topics. Most clubs I've ever belonged too usually didn't have a geek like me in it and certainly most were pc illiterate unfortunately for the most part but... if they had a phone that was another issue which brings me to my next point - mobile. 

In mobile we want to make it easier for users to get what they want to interact as quick as possible without requirements / extra time of posting to a specific forum. I open my phone, find my club, hit the forum tab and walla, everything I need without the need to do more.

My post is just my opinion on my past club experiences so what I say may not apply to every situation but I feel would apply to most. Just my 2 cents here.

Regards

 

I think you're taking about something different.  The OP is requesting categories of clubs.  For eaxnple, Club A and Club B belong to the California Car Club.  

What you're talking about is categories inside clubs.  

[mrbowers]

This is just a OPTION for some communities and not all communities may want this, all i'm requesting is they make a option to make "Categories and or Categories within Categories" and option not too. Yes adding a filter option as well if you don't use "Categories" option.

[PacmanDo]

I believe Clubs are going to be a big deal. Kudos to the IPS team here ?

I also applaud what they are doing with the Commerce integration with clubs. Making it so Members can create their own subscription, service or product related clubs. Obviously the IPS team sees something big here as well.

I'm sure most will start small. As the number of member generated clubs grows there will be a HUGE NEED FOR CATEGORIES. The custom items method will be cumbersome and really won't fit the bill. For sure not intuitively.

I am very grateful to the team here for handing something to us that finally gives us a bit of an edge towards other social networks.

Members will now be able to earn from their content.

Thank you @Charles @Lindy and the rest of the crew here!! ? 

[mrbowers]

Lots of ideas in here how this could be done, shame no one from dev's side could do this for us. 

[BomAle]

Consider this: is not possible to add a club in more than one category (instead tags/keywords do it)

I like as it is, filters it or link/share specified clubs with custom filters.

What I suggest: into tag results is useful know what are clubs that have content with it.

[EmpireKicking]

agree

[BHegnauer]

This would be extremely helpful. 

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

agree

[LiquidFractal]

On 4/17/2018 at 7:33 AM, Joel R said:

Once admins have the custom field setup, users will see a new "Sort By" option in their list of clubs. 

I see the logic behind this, but to a certain extent it assumes a tech-savvy user base.  I think a lot of people out there are going to look for the typical category structure and they won't want to bother with Sort menus, which seems a bit counterintuitive.

[christopher-w]

On 4/14/2018 at 9:11 PM, mrbowers said:

Hello, would be nice to build "Categories" for clubs. Instead of throwing it all in one area.

 

I moved away from Xenforo last week  - lured (and that's the word!) by the clubs facility here. But as above, disappointed that we can't categorise.

So this morning I set about hacking a solution, using custom fields, friendly urls, secondary nav bar category selectors, and some JS glue. Here it is... (not a mockup).

 

 

User clicks on menu item in 2nd nav bar. Filter is applied, class added to body tag. CSS does the rest.

Things to note:

1/ friendly url 

2/ styled 2nd nav

3/ category added to page title

4/ health icon before page title

As stated, it is a hack, but will write up in more detail if others find this useful. There's a little more work to do around filtering by paid/my clubs and sorting - but I think it should work ok. Haven't looked at the mobile rendering yet, so might find some gotchas there.

As I said this is a morning's work, so a couple of days more should see it usable. With your help of course. And notwithstanding the above, would love to see:

1/ Club cats in core.

2/ App and instance specific classes added to body tag. Would make JS skinning so much easier!

Best wishes,

Chris

 

[kmk]

On 6/3/2018 at 12:35 AM, liquidfractal said:

I see the logic behind this, but to a certain extent it assumes a tech-savvy user base.  I think a lot of people out there are going to look for the typical category structure and they won't want to bother with Sort menus, which seems a bit counterintuitive.

?

[jtomelevage]

Agree.  +1 for this feature.

[Cyboman]

Yes please, like this ->

If I could do anything like in my example above, it would be great as a temporary solution until we get an implemented solution.

Unfortunately, I never received a response how to build a construct like in the example above

[christopher-w]

On 7/26/2018 at 1:09 PM, christopher-w said:

 

I moved away from Xenforo last week  - lured (and that's the word!) by the clubs facility here. But as above, disappointed that we can't categorise.

So this morning I set about hacking a solution, using custom fields, friendly urls, secondary nav bar category selectors, and some JS glue. Here it is... (not a mockup).

 

 

User clicks on menu item in 2nd nav bar. Filter is applied, class added to body tag. CSS does the rest.

Things to note:

1/ friendly url 

2/ styled 2nd nav

3/ category added to page title

4/ health icon before page title

As stated, it is a hack, but will write up in more detail if others find this useful. There's a little more work to do around filtering by paid/my clubs and sorting - but I think it should work ok. Haven't looked at the mobile rendering yet, so might find some gotchas there.

As I said this is a morning's work, so a couple of days more should see it usable. With your help of course. And notwithstanding the above, would love to see:

1/ Club cats in core.

2/ App and instance specific classes added to body tag. Would make JS skinning so much easier!

Best wishes,

Chris

 

For those interested I am in the process of adding Isotope filtering and sorting to clubs. It's a more robust solution than attempt #1 above and will allow filtering and sorting based on a single custom field.

I'm almost there but am hitting jQuery conflicts. If anybody wants to help me solve these, I can release the code for others to use.

Here's Isotope for those of you not familiar with it.

https://isotope.metafizzy.co/

 

[Adriano Faria]

Another useful missing feature is a subnode (or subcategory). It works fine; not sure why IPS opted to no use it.

Of course it requires a template tweak to not show subnode tabs.

This would reduce several "TOPICS" tabs to only one.