This week, we have done some very necessary upgrades to the old — and frankly outdated — Organize Forum screen. For those of you who don’t manage the forums, the Organize Forums screen was where moderators could change the grouping (moving forums from the IC to the OOC group for example) and order of forums within each group.
The Organize Forums screen was the first form on RPGpad which featured drag-and-drop functionality. Because we were still struggling to integrate this functionality in our own libraries — especially since users had to be able to order both individual forums and groups — we kept it separate from forum editing and creation.
One consequence of this was that to add a forum to, say, the IC group, you had to first create a forum, then go to Organize Forums and drag it into the IC group. Since then we have made significant strides in terms of drag-and-drop but the Organize Forums screen was never updated to reflect this.
We have now merged the forum creation and organization into a new Manage Forums screen. Here, you can create, edit and order forums, as well as manage forum grouping, all in one location. The new code uses our standardized drag-and-drop code instead of using custom code, and takes full advantage of the latest updates to that library. This means you can now add and configure a new forum directly in the IC group, without having to swap between pages.
Cleaning up old and outdated ‘technical debt’ is always a good step in larger projects like RPGpad, but being able to do so while also adding convenience for forum moderators is always a good thing. Moreover, part of this update also affects other parts of the site, including the character sheet, as is described in this weeks Changelog. We would love to hear your thoughts, on this and other developments. Are there any features you’d love to see? Let us know in the Community Forum!