Subforum Wikis

[Kaelon]

Hi there,

I understand that each namespace has to be a top-level forum, but can someone explain the use/need for subforums under namespace top-level forums? They don't really seem to accomplish much of anything. In particular: I have a top-level "Default" namespace (Wiki), and a subforum (Cities) with several hundred articles. Going to my wiki/Article Name will not pull up any of the articles in the subforum. Is there something I am missing with subforum wikis?

[pegasus]

Sub-forums are not automatically wiki-enabled. You can do this by editing the sub-forum in the Forum Manager, and setting "Enable wiki in this forum" to "Wiki".

If this has already been done, you may need to VaultWiki > Wiki URL Manager > Rebuild Page URLs.

[Kaelon]

1. Is there any reason why someone would use sub-forums?

2. Can I make my Namespaces sub-forums of other forums, or must they always be parent-level forums? Why?

Thank you!

[pegasus]

1. Someone might use sub-forums simply to organize the articles better on the forum side. Depending on your configuration, when you have thousands of articles, having them all in one forum might not make them easy to find.

2. Yes, you can make Namespaces sub-forums of other forums, just not sub-forums of other namespaces (yet). "Top-Level Forum" refers to the top-most forum in the namespace, but does not require it to have no parent itself. It used to be that way, but it was changed back in 2.5.0.

[Kaelon]

Oh, that's great to hear! Thank you.

[Mokonzi]

Another reason for sub-forums is the ability to restrict user access. I've got a sub-forum to the book namespace where I have access for only mt staff, and there I've got a number of manuals for their eyes only.

In the main Wiki namespace, I've got subforums that contain articles under development, and are currently restricted to the usergroup that is working on adding the content.

[Kaelon]

I'm thinking of combining all of my Wiki namespace subforums into a single forum (they were previously segregated due to how NuWiki worked with listing all of the articles, making it a challenge to go through them), and using Categories to organize them. What do all of you think?

[Mokonzi]

It probably is better that way, unless you have specific reasons to use seperate tags. I've just added a Portal namespace to my site to allow me to mimic the way portals work on Wikipedia, but as I'll have articles with similar names, it was easier to create the new namespace rather than a new forum.

Categories is a very useful feature, and with being able to choose an article for the frontpage of a namespace, (and subforums) you can allow that to organize what you want, referencing the list view of the forum/namespace for a full list of articles.