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Okay, in my weblog I have topics for projects, and when the projects are completed/abandoned and I don't want to post in them anymore, I still want to leave them around for people to read. The problem is, I don't want them in the main topics block. I only have one of these so far, and I just put it to the bottom of the list and put "ARCHIVE:" before the name, but when these pile up that won't do. Is there any other way of handling this?

Well?

This topic (no pun intended) is a chance for me to finally get to the bottom of this story archive feature.

1) From what I gather, you can't archive topics, but only stories. In order to archive topics (manually), you'd have to use the menu plug-in and set those topics as sub-topics under the archive topic. Am I right?

2) As for archiving stories, first I would have to manually declare an archive topic?

3) When the stories auto expire, they would just move to the topic which I previously declared as the archive topic?

4) Which means they'd lose their topics' structures (they would just be arranged in a big topic of unrelated stories sorted by dates)?

5) Which also means they would get the archive topic's permissions instead of their original topics' ones?

Now for the troubleshooting questions:

6) What would happen at the moment of auto expiring if I didn't declare an archive topic?

7) Would the archived stories still be on the frontpage?

8 ) Is there a "manual auto expire" feature ("manual" alone would be switching stories' topics' IDs to the archive topic's via PHPMyAdmin...)?

The answers to 1-4 are: Yes.


Good question. I sure hope so.



Nothing.



If you have an archive topic: No.



No.

bye, Dirk

How can this not happen?


How is this done? Does auto expire switch the story's visibility setting (if it's not already so) to "Show Only in Topic"?


So what's the best way to archive my stories if I hadn't previously marked them for auto expire? Is it simply:
1. Using PHPMyAdmin to change their topics' IDs to the archive topic's one?
and
2. (Assuming you answered "yes" for the question above this section) using PHPMyAdmin to switch (if it's not already so) their visibility setting to "Show Only in Topic"?

If so, the only downside is losing the topics' structure I worked so hard on (unless, as I said before, I'd use the menu plug-in)...not to mention that I have some stories in multiple languages and, if archived, they'd be put alongside each other in the same topic...

P.S.
If so, would you still say "I sure hope so" about step 1. above (whether the stories, after been manually archived, would start using the archive's topic's permissions instead of their original topics')?

Thanks!

Yes. The "Featured story" flag is also reset.



Remind me not to make this sort of comments in your presence ...

When a story is "archived", it is assigned to the archive topic and therefore that topic's permissions apply. The story's own permissions, though, remain unchanged.

However, it sounds like you shouldn't really be using the archive topic if you're so concerned about your topic structure and such ...

bye, Dirk

Oh, so you were only kidding about the "I sure hope so"...

Anyway, so was I right about what it takes to do a "manual auto expire" (both PHPMyAdmin steps)?