Split up Evolution and Revolution in forum

I would like to see Revolution and Evolution being split up in the forum. I’m a newbie to MODx and CMS’es in general. A big pile with Revo and Evo per category isn’t very handy. It’s hard for me, and probably others, to see to which platform a topic belongs.

Quote from: jambek2003 at Nov 19, 2010, 02:21 PM

I would like to see Revolution and Evolution being split up in the forum. I’m a newbie to MODx and CMS’es in general. A big pile with Revo and Evo per category isn’t very handy. It’s hard for me, and probably others, to see to which platform a topic belongs.

This is definitely being planned; we’ve been aware it is a pain point for quite some time. We just haven’t had the time or resources to deal with it properly until recently.

@Opengeek. Maybe the community can help you guys. I’m thinking up loud; send everybody who started a post an email. Ask them if they would to tag there topics with Revo or Evo.

@Opengeek:
When you find time to improve the forum structure, another useful thing would be a "Show my unanswered posts" link. Sometimes a post can remain unanswered because it was too long or for some other reason. A feature to find such posts easily would help to clean the forum a little bit.

I’ve got *some* experience with forum administration. If you want I can make a draft of how the forum could be split up, and show that to the community?

I wouldn’t mind doing the tedious work of making the new forums, moving things around etc etc.



The hardest part is probably deciding what to do with the huge amount of posts that are currently in the forums and are not tagged Evo/Revo, and going through thousands of topics to decide where to move it to sounds over the top. The contents of some forums could simply be moved (think release specific questions, modx next), but others overlap..

Open to all suggestions Mark. Please go for it!

Okay. First maybe a little bit about the thought behind it.

Of course Evo and Revo should be split, and I believe you should also split up the addons or extras. Part of that is also the development of it. Right now there’s one "In development" forum where both Revo and Evo are being displayed/announced.

I’ve tried to decrease the number of forums, however by splitting up most forums based on Revo or Evo, I ended up with a few more. That said, if you’re someone who develops on Evolution you can simply hide all of the forums in the Revolution categories (by clicking on the category name) and the other way around, so that would mean less scrolling.


So, yeah. To sum it up, I mixed things around a lil’ and made sure all things that exist in both branches are seperated in their categories.


I made the list in OpenOffice, with the intention of copy/pasting the unordered list here, however that seems to be impossible as it just copies the text, and not the ul or at least some indention. Attached a .doc instead and made a mental note to get Office again...

The problem is where to move the old threads which are not obviously refering to Evo or Revo.
Why not - besides the Evo and Revo subforums - create another subforum for "uncategorised" threads? And ask the openers of these threads to tag them so they can be moved to the Evo or Revo section.

Personally, I would rather dump the forum categorisation altogether and simply use tags as a series of filters, with a date sort. I almost never pay any attention to what forum category I am responding to as my default view is either ’new replies’, ’unread posts’ or ’recent posts’.

In MODx terms, I kind of see it working as a cross between lexicons (I think it’s important that people ’get’ these, and get used to what they mean) and keyword autotag template variables. So you’d have some ’standard’ tags that applied a primary filter:

- Language
- Major version (Revo or Evo)
- Minor version (0.96, 1.04, 2.0.4, 2.0.5 etc)
- Involves package major (add on or bespoke snippet name/keyword)
- Involves package minor (version - including ’in development’ stuff)
- General area (use System- settings core lexicon as a starting point, together with some more general areas like ’newbie, business, e-commerce’)
With some more freeform (if you haven’t allowed the above to be freeform-ish):
- Type (question / comment / tutorial / request / offtopic)
- Level (beginner / moderate / advance) - probably the hardest one to judge
- Relevance (archive / deprecated/ current / unknown)
- Status (unresolved / resolved / unknown)

ie the basic principle is to categorise after you’ve created the content, not before - and allow for as much flexibility as possible. It would really help the forum get much more specific when looking for help - and if package maintainers had some kind of input, you could easily mark tonnes of threads as deprecated. If you coupled this with a ’like’ system, then you’d get much less newbie-angst when looking for stuff.

Anyhoo. I appreciate that the world and his coding wife will have different views on structure, but I’m happy to contribute to community-based tagging if that helps speed up the process - and I’m sure that they’re be others that would be willing to do that too. The core problem at present is (a) there are too many places to post, b) the search facility is absolute bobbins, (c) the user community is easily confused (especially Evo / Revo) and (d) there is an awful lot of historic content that serves little or no purpose (other than to further screw up (b).

Might this not be a good application of some sort of crowd-sourcing "game", like Galaxy Zoo or Phylo? The idea would be that someone could be served up a post which they would then characterize along various lines (e.g. as outlined above). Then that characterization could be applied as a default for any parent or child of that post in the thread. Those other posts could get served up as well, with these settings as defaults. People could tweak them if needed and after something has been reviewed some number of times (say, 3), it’s profile gets locked.

Not sure where the game/score/prize element would come into play, other than brownie points for those reviewing the most.

Anyway, just a thought ...
Matt