organize discussion by topic

[David A. Bayly]

>Question: Want to have a Manila site that manages a large scale discussion.
>Also want to have that discussion branch from 5 different discussion boards
>for instance (Life, Sports, Movies, Music and Animals). User clicks on the
>discuss link on the home page and is brought to a second page that lists the
>five major categories that are being discussed. Ideally that same page lists
>a message count for each category, a topic count within each category and
>the most recent post.
>
>Here's the scheme:
>Home Page -> Discussion Page
>Discussion Page -> (five categories)
>Each Category -> it's own set of discussions
>
>Has anyone done this?
>How hard is this to do?
>Is anyone willing to do this?
>How long would it take you to do this?
>

I've been involved in 2 projects that did this. They both 
(independently) hit on the same solution multiple websites that 
looked the same. In your case 5 web sites with 5 distinct DGs and one 
main website, perhaps a separate one again,  contains the page with 
the links to the category. Back links to the DG choice page in your 
templates and you've cracked it.

If you have a very active discussion, then splitting the DG to keep 
the number of messages down is a good thing to do, because Manila 
will have problems at some magic number of messages  because of the 
way that DGs are stored as a table of tables. The limiting  number 
will depend on circumstances and is likely > 10K messages but it 
something to keep in mind.
-- 

- David Bayly.       Programmer and digest reader.     dbayly at udena dot ch
  		Digest Readers do it once a day.