What would be really cool is changing the breadcrumbs (for forums) to dropdowns so you can either see all of its siblings in a dropdown menu. This can probably be used in other places as well.

But, of course the major drawback is the amount of extra HTML you are downloading. So a workaround would be to store it as a javascript arrays and build them all on the fly. It could probably be used in a bunch of other places as well.

what the hell is a breadcrumb?

"navbits"

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Actually, the major drawback would be the added queries for a small return.

Forumcache... no extra queries.

I would just have a script that you can run when you change forum layouts. It would write a delineated list of a forums subforum id's and names. Save these as text files and name them after the parent forums id.

Then you could hard code the link structure in javascript and create the output on the fly using AJAX.

You could put the empty table or div in the html with the display:none. Then just write to it using DOM and change the display propery. And those without js would just cruz along not even knowing they were missing something.

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Yeah I was thinking about storing it like that too, but then the whole permissions problem comes into play.

AJAX isn't a bad idea... most users won't know the feature exists so it is probably less of a performance hit this way as long as the server responds quickly. This would solve permission checking because you could use the server for it.

Well, does the current forumlist select box not show forums you can't see? I have never looked at that. Just because they click doesn't mean they can enter.

You could also save the text files based on permisions as well and call them accordingly. It's not like you will have to run the script very often on an established site.

Text files are much smaller than xml and most servers have mod_deflate or mod_gzip so they open extremely fast.

and example of a file would be.

forum1:1|forum2:2|forum3:3|etc:4

Then you just use the delineator's to make your arrays in javascript.

For a while there we were playing around with Flash breadcrumbs, but we got sidetracked and never finished it :p

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