I searched through the archives and didn't really see the answer I was looking for on either of these so if you will indulge me to explain, I hope I can make it clear what I would like to implement. First, and I think this will make it clearer. The intended installation is for a sports site and I would like to run forums for at least all the major league teams in the four major leagues, plus bunches of others.

Idea 1.

I would like to have not only categories (like they are now used to seperate the forums), but subcategories as well, and a description for the Category, Subcategory and Forum. Example: Category = NFL, Subcategory = AFC West, Forum = Seattle Seahawks, etc...

With this structure, I would like the main page of forums to show only the Categories as links with descriptions like NFL, NBA, etc.. Then each link would point to a Subcategory page where the forums would be grouped according to the Subcategories.

As you go through the various parts of the program (ie on postlist), the navigation would show links to the other teams in the Subcategory (which would generally always be a league), plus a link back to the main forum page.

And let's take this a step further since I'm asking for the world <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" /> What would be really nice is to have some sort of relationship between these, so if I was on the Seattle Seahawks forum, my navigation could also include a link for the Seattle SuperSonics forum in the NBA Subcategory and the Seattle Mariners forum in the MLB Subcategory.

It all sounds so easy when I say it out loud, but I'm sure it's not that easy. Ideally I'd like to avoid multiple installations, which seems complicated in that people should only need to register once but be able to access/post to any of the forums, especially the related cities.

Idea 2.

I would also like to be able to customize each forum to use the team's colors, the image sets being used and the headers and footers so that each one is really personalized to that team.


I don't know if anyone has done anything like this (I can hope can't I?), or if anyone has any thoughts on the easiest way to accomplish it with the least overhead. Fortunately, a lot of the info stays static from season to season, so I was thinking that I could create a bunch of configuration files and header/footer files, then just use the category and subcategory in some sort of if statement, that would basically say "if nfl-seahawks-w3ttheme.pm exists, use that, else use w3ttheme.pm and ditto with the header.include and footer.include

Anyone have any ideas on how best to accomplish something like this.

Jerry