Does it make sense to just inherit from OrderedFolder and allow Managers/Reviewers to arbitrarily order the forums? I'm not sure that most recent forum is necessarily the one that I'd always like to see at the top of the list.

I think the forum ordering should be explicitly defined. You normally group them by context. I would also like to see a category field like in PHC/PSC, so you can group forums under headers.

Explicit ordering should be by most recent updated conversation/post. this is most useful for people that keep up the conversation, the frequent posters.

I agree that grouping of forums is important.

Marshall

Forums should be orderable. The sorting of conversations should be fixed (I think this is related to fix sorting of batched tables in general).

OK, some good discussion above. Thanks, Limi, Marshall, Tim, Florian. Here's my cut at summarizing and synthesizing.

We seem to have two related-but-distinct issues going on here.

1) Ordering of conversations (threads) within a forum.

2) Ordering (and grouping, thanks, Limi!) of forums within a Ploneboard

I think we have agreement that conversations within a forum should default to sorting by the most recently updated conversation, per Marshall's suggestion. The best way to achieve flexible sorting of conversations might well be to better harness or improve Plone's core sortable table functions (per Florian).

Display of forums within a board (issue #2) seems to be more subtle. Marshall and I had initially simply imagined that they should also be sorted most recent on top. Tim & Limi suggested explict (manual) sorting via OrderedFolders, and added the observation that forums should be groupable.

Grouping seems like an obvious good idea.

I think explicit sorting would probably work fine for most cases. However, I would like to see the default sort be the most active forum, instead of the first-created forum. Or even better, for the board admin to be able to choose between explicit ordering and automated sorting. But I realize this might be too difficult, in which case I think that explict ordering only would probably be OK.

Does this seem both sensible and feasible?

I think other kinds of sorting of the forums (besides explicit sorting and grouping) can wait for a future version.

Marshall

At the risk of opening a can of worms, I'll retract my last statement. I think it would be quite useful to display the contents of a conversation with the most recent comment first (currently the most recent comment is last). this is a preference that should be site site-wide. The default is as it should be, but the option, set in a Ploneboard Setup option, would be for most recent first.