I have made some reorganization of categories and made some improvements for forums. 
1. Topics on the main page
Now we have most useful categories showcased at the main page -
- “Support” category is at the top of the page for easier access.
- “Tutorial development” category renamed to “Tutorials” and placed to the homepage root. The category is intended for new tutorials made by Synfig community.
- New category “Assets & Templates” is intended to collect various reusable stuff - like character rigs, object collections, useful templates (YOW Sliders and Jake Rig by @Khemardi are good examples, hope to see them posted there soon
).
- “Scripting” category now renamed to “Plugins” and moved to the homepage. Let’s collect Synfig plugins there.
2. Improved topic list
Topics in “Tutorials”, “Assets & Templates”, “Plugins” and “Artwork” categories now display thumbnail images (1) -
The thumbnailing is possible thanks to this addon.
The topic thumbnail is generated from the first image in the first post.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t works for videos.
If you wish to add a thumbnail to your post, but keep this image invisible, then you can use this trick: add image as regular upload and then specify its size as “1x1”. This will scale inserted image to 1x1 px size which is effectively invisible.
I invite you to add thumbnails to your posts in mentioned categories to make your posts stand out from the crowd.
One more addition is a column, showing the number of likes for each topic (2). You can even sort topics by count of likes!
I have used an advice form this post to add this functionality.
3. Plans for further modifications
I am proposing to make following changes to forums structure:
- Remove “Off-topic discussions” subcategory (under “General” category).
- Remove “Non-Synfig” subcategory (under “Artwork” category).
Reason for both proposals above: I assume the forums are intended for discussing Synfig-related stuff. Unrelated stuff should be discussed in some other place.
By “removing” subcategory I assume that we can make them hidden and locked for further posting.
-
I suggest to merge all current subcategories of “Support” category into one subcategory called “English”. And then move all subcategories of “Non English Forums” to “Support” category.
-
I suggest to remove “Morevna Project” sub-category from “Artwork” category. I can selectively merge Synfig-related posts to “Artwork” category, but in general there are no need for this separate category anymore.
Please let me know what you think about the proposals.
