Mark messages new / read by category

I agree, it would definitely be nice to have those options in the menu when you're viewing the unread posts page for a particular category or board. I think adding those options to the menu is possible as a customization, but unfortunately the files that would need to be edited are not currently exposed through Lithium Studio, so this would need to be performed by Lithium Professional Services. If you'd like to pursue this customization further, please file a case in the support portal so that our Professional Services team can get in contact with you and work on the next steps:

http://supportcases.lithium.com/

If you haven't already, I would also suggest adding this to our idea exchange:

http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/customer-ideas/idb-p/Lithium_Ideas

If you'd like to pursue this customization yourself, I think there are some changes you could make to get pretty close to what you want. First off, there are two standard components you can leverage:

category.widget.mark-new
category.widget.mark-read

When a category context is available (ie. on a category page, or on the UnreadPostsPage with a category specified in the URL path), these components display links to mark the messages for a category as new or read. So you could create your own component and add it to the UnreadPostsPage via Studio. Within your component, you can use the <@component> FreeMarker macro to render the components. For example:

<@component id="category.widget.mark-new"/>
<@component id="category.widget.mark-read"/>

You could wrap these components in whatever HTML you desired and style as needed. You could potentially even recreate the "Options" drop-down menu if you desired. If you're recreating the menu and want to include the community-level links, those components are:

community.widget.mark-new
community.widget.mark-read

I hope this helps!