Possible for MSN's to share members and not forums?

+ a couple more questions regarding MSN's

Is this at all possible?

I plan to have a main website, and then have numerous MSN sites with the hope that the member-base between all of them can be shared, but each site will have a slightly different scope, and so the need to have separate forums would be necessary.

Also, is there a system limit on how many MSN's can be part of a "network" or is there no limit (in terms of Composr and how many MSN's it will allow to be inter-connected).

And, how should the netlink setting be configured? I assume the MAIN site should link to its own netlink.php file and all sub sites should copy that exact same URL?

Lastly, all MSN's must link to the main sites forum DB? Should they have a separate DB for the Composr bit? What if the main site operates off only one DB (same DB for Composr and Conversr) or should the main site operate off different MySQL DB's?

If not possible out of the box, maybe a trick to achieve this?

I was thinking, somehow trick each installation into only displaying one "root" forum category. I was reading up on the Composr docs, and it doesn't really detail why there's even a root category or of what purpose it serves (all it says is that the root cannot be deleted). The only thing as far as I can tell, is that whatever the "root" is named, this will also be the title for the forum:forumview page.

Each MSN shares the forum (and therefore the members) with the main site. They do get their own db for everything else. I think there is a way to show forums as if they belong to a MSN in the core already 'show forum within website' or some such. I don't think there is a defined limit to how many MSN's you can have. Not sure about the rest, but generally I think it will do what you require of it. Just remember that anything you use on an MSN (custom comcode, addons, etc) should be available on the main site. I'll let someone else answer the rest, and correct me if I'm wrong

The 'virtual roots' system is what you need. If you click the last link in the breadcrumbs when viewing a forum (as an admin) it will give you the URL to view it as if that's the root. You'll see keep_forum_root in the URL.

Chris Graham said

The 'virtual roots' system is what you need. If you click the last link in the breadcrumbs when viewing a forum (as an admin) it will give you the URL to view it as if that's the root. You'll see keep_forum_root in the URL.

From “Post #4,408”, 21st May 2018, 7:03 pm

I'm trying to display a completely different set of forums for each MSN. I'm not familiar with the virtual roots concept, but playing around with the breadcrumbs like you said only seem to change the trailing of the forums within the actual breadcrumbs. It doesn't show or hide individual forums.

For example - let's say my central site is about apples. The forums will be relevant to that and only that. Now let's assume one of my MSN sites is about kittens - this MSN would have its own set of forums relevant to that and wouldn't include any forums about apples.

It stops you going higher than the root you set, unless the user is manipulating the URL manually.

That's the only way to achieve this, unless a fundamental rewrite of a lot of code was done.

I see.

So I'd have to create an actual forum (instead of a forum grouping) for each MSN essentially, and add sub forums to that to keep everything under one "category". Then somehow manipulate the system to link to that forum while keeping that parameter in the URL.

I assume this would require allowing ALL usergroups access to the Open up categories as virtual roots permission in order for it to work properly?

Correct.

I assume this would require allowing ALL usergroups access to the Open up categories as virtual roots permission in order for it to work properly?

No. This privilege is just for presence of the link in the breadcrumbs, it's a UI triviality - absence of the privilege stops users getting confused.

My original idea was to prefix each forum, and in the template of each MSN check which prefix it had and only display if the prefix matched that of current site. Then use {$REPLACE} to remove the prefix from the output.

That's a bit messy I would think.

Chris Graham said

Correct.

I assume this would require allowing ALL usergroups access to the Open up categories as virtual roots permission in order for it to work properly?

No. This privilege is just for presence of the link in the breadcrumbs, it's a UI triviality - absence of the privilege stops users getting confused.

From “Post #4,412”, 21st May 2018, 10:06 pm

I can't do much of anything on my MSN's due to me not being able to access them currently (reported in tracker, but no rush ). I'll give that a shot and see how it works once we come up with a fix to that.

Thanks Chris.