I've paused development of this extension. Partly because I have a mostly working site in CF that does what I need. I just need to finish it, and partly because Swell may help here. I'm not trying to make a blog extension for Vanilla, but I do want to display content from other blogs, and there's a chance the Swell may be better configured to extend than Vanilla for this.

Do you mean for there to be an additional field on the new discussion page to manually put this text in.. Or for it to automatically fetch the text from your post?

well, whether or not Swell comes out, I do plan on doing this eventually. I'd like to share my aggreagator code with folks after it's done, and CF isn't the best language to do that in. CF has a very thriving developer community with lots of great OS projects, but the folks how use them tend to be other CF developers, where in PHP OS projects, just about anybody can get them up and running on a most web hosts.

Another issue for me was trying to get the extension done elegantly, i.e. not using the ObjectFactory and not using an exension that relies on a seperate theme. I don't want to write something that has dependencies on other extensions or could break other extensions.

...allowed admins to specify that 'x' characters of the text of the first item of a new discussion could be displayed under the discussion's title?

I would amend that to say 'allowed admins or users to specify' ...

I'm sure there is a great reason for this but I am wondering for the first time why this never became a routine feature of forum software? This is a serious question; does anyone have some ideas?

I can think of thousands of times (literally) where I have clicked a thread title whose leading content proved misleading or simply uninteresting. If I could have viewed 50 or 100 or even 150 characters of all FIRST forum thread entries at my option, I would have been a happier camper.

I guess I'm saying that the more I consider this, the more it seems like a no-brainer killer feature for all forum software - really a core feature. What am I missing re: design, interface, coding or performance?

And my whole purpose is to present Vanilla as a set of blog posts rather than a forum. Think of it as a blog with enhanced commenting features :-)

bloggish forums? hahaa

or integrate the excellent open source, Nucleus, with vanilla....that is what I am in the middle of doing eg www.love2escape.com/multitrackers

Two months on ...

Any hackers with a desire (need?) for this yet? I can see the trade-offs raised but still feel, on balance, it would be super-cool useful. In fact, it seems like the kind of thing that would leverage entirely new possibilities for congruent Vanilla apps. Given the smarts of the hackers here, I must be missing a large downside. Alas, I can read and tinker with PhP but not code without blowing myself up and anyone in proximity. Real Soon Now.

I am not thinking of the add-on as simulating a blog, though an admin could fool with CSS and specify a full display of the first post to a discussion. Instead, I would choose just enough characters to serve as a come-on to read the posts (100? 200?).

@Minisweeper: Would be way nicer still if users could choose for themselves. Intrusive? Off. Short excerpts - choose 100 characters. Entire content of first post for all displayed discussions? The reader pays the usability price (well, the server does ;-) for page load nastiness.

It's true this would also discourage (as well as encourage) click-through; probably a wash. However, my ordinary-person communities have so little online time that they would appreciate the implied filtering. I suspect it would encourage first posts to be crisper about the subject too; at least at the top of the post.

@mary - yes, exactly like an auto-excerpt.

Lansmash is cool - who designed it, eh? Howww .... ?

Neato. It's apples-to-oranges to my specific request for excerpting the first post of every discussion but cool in its own write. Still hoping for that extension too. I'll drop him a line and ask him to weigh in on the implementation tradeoffs of a generalized solution even if he won't want to do it himself.

Would be nice if he could contribute that News extension to the community. Also, I didn't test, but if he's managed to get Gallery 2 and Vanilla integrated (ie once single logon for both systems) I'd be extremely interested in how he did it, as I'm sure others would also.

I'm willing to test for you if you want.

Yes, please give us the chance to test it. That would be great.

I've not downloaded it yet, but I've thought of a killer feature. The option to have it excerpt either the first post, or the most recent post :D

Concerning "moving the excerpt closer to the discussion title", I found that the excerpt display varied from style to style. It would only require a css change (if I were smarter) to get it correct.

I will look into getting the first and last comment.