(topic.gif) Folders
and Discussions
Outline View of Discussions
Ordering the Contents of a Folder
Resources
Folders are containers, like those on your hard drive, which can contain other folders and/or discussions, links or chat rooms. Discussions are documents where you can post messages. Discussions and folders both have a "description" area at the top where you can put a few paragraphs of text to explain what's below. When you create a discussion or folder, you're asked for the title and a description. The title is how the discussion or folder is identified in the containing folder. The description goes at the top of the folder or discussion just below the title. The description is also sometimes called a "header" in the documentation.
To edit the folder or discussion title or header, click Edit when you're inside that folder or discussion.
To alter the maximum size of a folder or discussion header, go to the Sysop Control Panel.
To set the maximum items you can list in a folder, go to Control Panel > Customizing > Folders > Presentation. If you put more than that in a folder, you'll get a button at the bottom of the list to show the rest.
Folders have a folder
icon alongside their title in the containing folder:
(topic.gif)
Discussions have a
discussion icon alongside their title in the containing folder: 
(converse.gif)
Discussions can be
viewed either as outline, showing just the title, author, and time/date, or
in their entirety. To see the outline view of a discussion, click on the small
triangle to the left of the discussion icon: 
Or, click on the Outline button in the small button bar above the messages, when you're within the discussion. These views work in both threaded and conversational views.
To enable the presence of the Outline button, you'll need to go to the Control Panel > Customizing > Discussions and look for the Outline setting in the Threaded Messages area.
Ordering the Contents of a Folder
You can choose to display the contents of a folder several ways. You can have newly-created material appear at the bottom of the list or at the top of the list. Or you can have the most recently active discussion appear at the top. Another option is to list the material alphabetically. If none of these are what you need, you can use sort sequence numbers to place items in exactly the order you want.
In the Control Panel > Customizing > Folder > Presentation, you can make this choice on a site-wide basis.
To edit the sort order for a single folder, use the setting in Edit Folder > other folder settings > sort order.
You can also use sort sequence to manually place them in the order you want. Sort sequence is simply a number that determines where on the page the item will appear. Higher-numbered items appear further toward the top of the page. Lower-numbered items, including those with negative numbers, go further down toward the bottom of the page.
Folders, discussions, links, and chat rooms are given a default sort sequence when they're created. All objects with the same sort sequence number are put in order according to the default setting you chose in the Sysop Control Panel for folder items.
Folders are created with a default sort sequence of 100000. Discussions, links, and chat rooms are created with a default sort sequence of 0. You can override this sort sequence in the Edit area for each object to put them in the order you choose. (For folders, go to Edit > Folder Appearance.)
For example, this is how the following objects would be ordered on the page, when the default appearance is to alphabetize the items:
Name |
Sort Sequence Number |
|
100000 |
|
100000 |
|
500 |
|
500 |
|
500 |
|
0 |
|
-100 |
|
-200 |
You can use this technique to alphabetize the contents of a folder when the rest of your site isn't presented alphabetically. For example, all items beginning with A would receive sort sequence numbers in the 2600s, all items beginning with B would receive numbers in the 2500s, etc.
Sort sequence numbers can be negative or positive.
In Preferences, users can override your default ordering and choose to view the folders and discussions with one of the other ordering options. If you want to make certain your material is always presented in the order in which you choose, you'll need to use sort sequence numbers to accomplish that.
Sysop Docs
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