TinyPortal

I am wondering if there is a way to do something simular to www.craigslist.com in the fact that you can search by state.  We are having people post things they want help with and it would be nice if there were a way in which they can post from a particular state...say Iowa and when someone wants to help, they can search all of the Iowa postings.

I have added the state field to the profile...not sure it something can be done with this.  It seems to me that this should be pretty simple!???

Thanks,
Skip

One of our code specialists may have a better answer for you but I don't think that there will be an easy way to do what you are asking for.

Creating a board for each state might work but that would give you way too many boards so its doubtful that would work very well.

sgilleland, couldn't you create one main board and then have child boards in the board of the state you want. That way they can do an advanced search and only check the state they want to see (board they want to see ;)).

Using the profile field, you could do a search for people from a given state. From that point, you could go to the person's profile and read all posts by that person. It's possible that you could even narrow it down to all the topics started by that person.

Or you could go another way, which would be to set up a template for people to use when posting, so that it would be easier to search. Of course, you would have to rely on people posting correctly, which is a pretty iffy thing. There is code somewhere on around her to create a template for every new topic. I'm not sure what you'd search for to find it, though.

All in all, though, I don't think a forum is going to give you what you want. You need a database with specific fields in order to do it most efficiently.