Not a help request but a discussion.
Usually nobody recommends manually adjusting the database, and with good reason. Does that ever stop me? .
Here I am again with a need to mass-add forums. I want to add about 150 new forums to the site, basically a standard set of 5-6 subforums in each of about 25 forums. That's a tedious process by hand. There's no way to mass add them through the ACP.
I've tried before to add forums through SQL and it was a disaster because of the (left_id) and (right_id) vars. I'm apprehensive about trying again without better knowing what I'm doing. I know what (left_id) and (right_id) vars are, where they are, and what they're for. But I'm not sure of how/where phpbb manipulates them (like when you add a new forum or re-order the forums in the ACP).
Has anyone here attempted such a feat?
Also by chance does anyone know where the functionality is for creating a new forum in the ACP? It sure would make the process easier to do 150x manually through the ACP if I could already have the default settings to my liking. Then I could just pop in the name and hit "enter." I was thinking about trying to track down that function and editing the standard default settings for the two I always change.
Again, not expecting a magic answer. This post is more for discussion.