[Harry K.]

Thinking of including a "Tour Guide" feature which could fix that Using IntroJS. Lots of sites use things like this to offer a "Tour" to new users and first time visitors. I would essentially be planning on having a modal popup offering to take the user through the "Forum Tour", the user could also click a button to run the tour again.

Forum admins can set multiple tours, for example have a "Basic Tour" showing you the pages the forum offers, and you could have "Posting tour" which takes them through posting and replying. Lots of possibility.

The plugin also has a really cool "Hints" feature. When triggered (Either page load, or button click etc..) little circle "hint" bubbles will show on elements, when a user hovers/clicks the bubble it shows the hint. Either this or the tour can be used to show your forums cool features in a fun interactive way!

Problem is the hints are triggered using javascript, and the "hints" are added using data-attribute. So for a forum admin to customise/configure their own forums tour, they would require the ability to atleast identify a html element, and add data-hint="Hint Content Here" data-step="1/2/3". If wanting to have multiple tours, you also need to add a class to the html element and modify the javascript slightly. This can get really confusing for none designers/developers even with tutorials. 1 Mess up will disable the tour.

Edit: Instead of building the tour inline/in templates, I've decided to use JSON. This allows the ability to write out the hint, select the element, and define the step process all from one clean file. Keeping everything together and neat, will be a lot easier for editing etc.. Very clean code.

Code:

{
    element: document.querySelectorAll('#step1')[0],
    intro: "Test hint",
    position: 'right'
},

Thinking about it, this would be a freaking awesome plugin if someone had the know how.

Edit 2: After doing a little research and a little more testing I'm thinking about the possibility of using LinkedIns Hopscotch instead of the IntroJS I used to display above. Looks generally better built, with more customisability and options. I am also looking into the possibility of using the built in API to build a section in the Admin CP where admins can create different tours easily without having to edit much if any code, however no promises as this will be a heavy learning curve for me.