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An alternate look for forum_view

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An alternate look for forum_view
OK, so here I changed the way forum search results look on our site, by breaking the results out of a table and adding some text from the body of each result. I started thinking (a dangerous thing, of course) that this might also be interesting to try in the forums themselves.

I tinkered with forum_view.html to create a page that looks more like a series of blog entries or news posts than the standard subject/number of replies/last post table. You can see the results here. Getting that look meant removing the table tags wrapped around and inside the loop post_loop and adding in the modified post_message variable discussed above for each post. I also had to come up with new up.gif and down.gif icons, since the ones that come with the software are white, which didn't show up real well on a white background :-).

For added goodness, I probably should've saved the new forum_view.html as part of a separate template directory, so users could choose between "classic" and "new," but right now we don't have a real user community (one of the problems I'm trying to fix), so that wasn't as much an issue for me as I'm sure it would be for other folks.

I can post the file if anybody's interested, but with the caveat that it's so heavily changed from the out-of-box version (due more to getting it to fit into our overall site design than this particular mod), that it might be easier to just start playing with your own forum_view.html file. Also, another thing I did: added a post_description field in the post database table that is accessed through post_edit.html. That way, I can override the default 200-character blurb with something more meaningful (sometimes users do take a bit to get to the point) - and provide better results for both the forum search engine and our sitewide search engine.