I am in need of something to beef up the Social Engine Forum. Mostly I need the ability to nest subcategories. I am not finding much other than the Advanced Forum Plugin by Social Engine Add Ons. Does anyone have any experience or advice on this plugin?
https://www.socialengineaddons.com/socialengine-advanced-forums-plugin
TIA
Nancy
Hi Nancy,
As per your requirement shared in thread : http://community.socialengine.com/forums/topic/1761/forum-question-categories-within-categories, our plugin will let you create topics in following hierarchy :
A. Category = Legacy Toolbox
1. Sub Category = Series and Workshops
i. Forum
ii. Forum
iii. Forum
2. Sub Category = Recommended Resources
i. Forum
ii. Forum
To know more about this plugin's functionality and how it can help you in achieving your vision, please reach out to us at sales@socialengineaddons.com. Our team will assist you.
Best Regards,
Team SocialEngineAddOns
I want to add here that we decided to go with Social Engine Solutions, aka Social Networking Solutions and we used their Advanced Forum Plugin and we couldn't be happier!
Not only is the plugin robust, they have given me support that is exceptional. They have taught me how to do things myself at no cost. We have paid for some additional customizations and they all work beautifully. They have made modifications to the code for us at no cost as well.
I wanted to give Social Engine Solutions a positive comment here, because we have been very happy with their product and the support we received after the purchase.
And this is an unsolicited comment!!
Feel we can add some comments to this area for this plugin.
We added Advanced Forums to the core about 2 months ago, hoping for increased functionality and ease of use.
So, from the SAT plugin description, we expected: "Forums are a great platform to build a highly engaged online user community. It is used to share your views with people across the world, & provide a good reason to your users to get interacts, to respond or to react."
Other lines that sold it to us were:
Having installed and now used, its probably the worst bit of our site.
All Forums are open as you click on the menu. So, if you have a few categories and sub categories, you instantly need to start scrolling down. Not quite one click as promised. We asked if it could be Closed on page arrival, so users just opened the Category of interest? Custom development 35 to 40 hours at $25 per hour.
On a message title, it says "Last Post" by "member name" in "message title" where each one in "" is a link, so correctly, if you click on the members name, it takes you to that members profile. Clicking on the message title, takes you to the start of the message thread. Clicking on Last Post, takes you to the first post! Grrr. Again, development cost anticipated at $450. Just to make a link point to where it says it should go to!
Final annoyance, you have to scroll to the bottom of a page, to see a page count. So when a thread gets large, ie anything over a couple of pages of replies, you have to scroll down to the bottom of page 1 to see a box with all the page numbers, so you can select to jump to the last page of data. It really should be visible at the top of the page as well, so no scrolling is needed. Not asked for a price on that work yet!
Hopefully the above will help development in some way....."Advanced" to me should mean adding benefit! I'm guessing if we paid the $1500 plus then the next release of this would include all our development work....is that correct?
Hi Xtasia,
We are really sorry for the inconvenience caused. For budget related concerns, request you to please contact our sales team here: sales@socialapps.tech Team will surely checkout and will provide you with best possible quote.
In case you have any issues with the Advanced Forum Plugin then, you may contact our support here: support@socialapps.tech.
Thanks!
I don't have concerns, I've just found other ways of doing things so the Forums is hardly used now. I'm just highlighting shortfalls of the product for other people to read, as I feel they should know about some deficiencies in the product. If you wish to summarise my concerns above and send them through to your sales team for "a best possible quote" I will consider it, but as stated, I do feel we are all just paying for ongoing development at times.
Why don't you take the concerns / suggestions and build them into a release programme, so all your customers get considerable increase in value for money as future releases become available?
Hi Xtasia,
Thank you for voicing your concern. Your feedback profoundly worries us. I would like to apologise for your negative experience at SocialApps.tech. We didn't intend to give you such an experience, this is not typical of us.
I have requested the sales team to get back to you.
Regarding "Why don't you take the concerns / suggestions and build them into a release programme, so all your customers get considerable increase in value for money as future releases become available"
>> We do make timely improvements / enhancements in our plugins based on the feedback and suggestions we receive from our clients. But, the point is that we release those enhancements which are widely asked and suggested.
Thanks!
Thanks Ritu, but I still think you are missing the point. We are happy with most of the plugins, so we aren't going to mention them at all on forums like this. The Forum module lets the side down! Its an easy fix at a guess and you'll have a really good Advanced module.
Hi Xtasia,
We are glad to know your views about our other plugins and really appreciate you taking out time and trying to provide suggestions for our plugin's improvement.
I have conveyed these points to the development team as future enhancements. But, it is not possible to say for sure that whether these suggestions will be implemented or not because this totally depends on the number of requests we receive for a particular enhancement from our clients.
Thanks!