Itamar Tzadok

If you would like to have activities not associated with subjects (topics outline) what you can do is the following. Suppose you need 5 subjects. Go to the course settings and set the weeks/topics number to 6. Add all the activities to the 6th subject and then go to the settings again and set the course weeks/topics number to 5. As a result the 6th subject will not be visible but you will still have all the actitivies. You can provide access to the activities either via the Activities block or by creating web-links.

Hope this helps.   

changes in post.php. I'm not sure, however, what modifications were made to the html file. Did you remove the subect text field from the the reply edit window? Unfortunately I'm not administrating the system in my institution so I don't have access to the files and cannot compare them with yours.

Anyway, I'm preparing a list of required modifications which I will try to get our dev team to apply, and your input is an important addition to it.

It's also nice to know that I'm not the only one who finds the evolution of forums to be too deviating from the main characteristics of the good old dialog which is not necessarily about this or that technical problem. (considering the 'Forum Plus' project, it must be something in the air in Italy )

as you probably know, Antonio, large institutions are not too thrilled about applying even the most minor of customizations let alone major extensions, so they could keep maintenance cost low. And since I'm just a lowly user I won't have these features unless I get a research grant and have my own machine to experiment on or get the features added to the standard module. That's why I started with the expand/collapse feature which is really very simple to implement.

Btw, there are two kinds of expand/collapse. One is of threads in the hierarchical view, and the other is of messages' bodies. I'm aiming at the latter although the former is also important. It seems from the brief description of the project that forum plus has the threads expand/collapse feature but I couldn't figure out whether it has the message content expand/collapse. Does forum plus have it? If it does I wonder why you chose to modify the threaded view. Surely, there is little difference between the nested and threaded views once the expand/collapse features are applied. The advantage of using the nested is that the sql query already provides the messages' content and thus modifying the view does not require more than local and limited changes to the html and some additional simple javascript. But perhaps you didn't care about that since you had to go through database changes for the other functionality anyway. For my purpose it is rather important. Since what I'm suggesting (at least the message content expand/collapse feature) is very easy to implement I hope that somehow it will find its way to the standard version soon. It is one small step to Moodle deveopers but one giant leap to forums users, I think.  

although the following change will not affect the Topic (the first message in the view).

Change:

.mod-forum .indent {
      margin-left: 10px;
}

to:

.mod-forum .indent {
     margin-left: 10px;
     text-align:center;
}

Btw, I haven't checked yet how this css change and the one I suggested above affect other forum views.

In style.php change:

.forumpost {
      margin-top: 15px;
}

to:

.forumpost {
      margin-top: 15px;
      width:600px;
}