OptimusBain Posted April 2, 2021 Posted April 2, 2021 Hello everyone, Today I learned something about IPS blocks and widgets that really surprised me. I've been using vBulletin for years (I hated it), and it was very easy to create a sidebar widget that would display the last topics/posts feed for a specific category. It even had the option to display the latest posts for the category on which the widget had been dragged on. On IPS, it's just impossible. Not only that, block locations and widgets work with templates. So, whenever I drag the default topic/post feed widget to a category, or a subcategory, or even a topic. All the cats, subcats and topics will inherit it 😞 I was shocked when I saw this today. Why? Because if you have a series of categories and you want to display the latest feed on the sidebar of each of them, it's just impossible. There is no way that you can control that. Its funny, because you are allowed to select the categories you want the topic feed to display but it won't care about it. It will use all the categories and subcategories for that specific template. The typical category structure of a forum would be something like this: ------- Parent Category 1 - Subcat 1 - Subcat 2 - Subcat 3 - Nested subcat 1 Topic Parent Category 2 Parent Category 3 ------- Well, if you want to have a sidebar widget displaying the topic feed of only the Nested Subcat 1, you won't be able to do it. Why? Because once you drag the block widget on the sidebar, topics from subcat 1 subcat 2 and subcat 1 and its parent category 1 will be filtered. You have an option to select the categories you want the topic feeds from, but it will just ignore it and display all the topics from all the categories down to the depth of the topic itself 😞 There is no way to individually display the posts/topics for each category on a sidebar. All the categories pull the data from the same source resulting in the impossibility ofindividualizing post and topic feeds. I would love to suggest that this changes in the future. Have a great day!
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