Step 1 - Go to the Site Manager
Go to the Site Manager (by default available at the page admin:manage). There should be a link on the side bar of your pages.
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Click on Forum & discussion » Settings.
You must have an administrator role within the Site to be able to do this.
Step 2 - Activate the forum
The instruction in Step 2 used to say "If your forum is not yet activated, click on activate forum now."
However this step is no longer necessary; from January 2011 onwards the forum is activated automatically when you create your site.
Step 3 - Nesting level
Decide if you want to have a linear discussion or threaded/nested discussion structure for your forum. Read more at the Site Structure document. Save options if you change the default settings.
Step 4 - Set up the structure
Before a forum can be used you must define categories the threads/topics would fall into.
Within the Site Manager click on Forum & discussion » Structure. There should be a group called Hidden that will contain deleted threads and per-page discussions, but this is not enough.
Look at Wikidot Community Forum to have an idea what the groups and categories are. Groups are top-level containers for categories and categories are containers for threads.
Suppose you want to create one group to hold two categories: General discussion and Help requests.
Within Forum & discussion » Structure click on create a new group.
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Enter e.g. "Forum discussion" as the name and "General forum discussion related to site «your-site-name»". Click save within the dialog window.
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In the new group box click on add category. A dialog will appear. Enter "General discussion" as a name and something (or nothing) as a description. Click save within the dialog window.
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Add another category called "Help requests" with the same method as above.
You can move groups/categories up or down by clicking links move up and move down.
You can also delete empty groups and categories.
If you have finished, click save at the bottom.
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Warning: the category names should be long enough not to make problems with other short category names! A good proposal is a minimum length of 3 or more characters!
For individual categories there can be separate nesting level settings. Read more about it here.
Now your forum is almost ready.
Step 5 - Set permissions
By default only the Members of your Site are allowed to post and start threads.
If this is not what you want, you can extend permissions to all Wikidot Users (with valid Wikidot.com accounts).
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You can also allow everyone (including Anonymous Users without Wikidot.com accounts) to use the forum. Use this with caution.
If you want Users to modify/edit posts, check/uncheck proper options. It is best to leave this option to the authors of the posts so every User is allowed to edit his/her own posts and not edit others.
Forum categories can have separate permissions or inherit the default settings.
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So:
Check/uncheck permissions for all forum categories or rather configure the default permissions that forum categories will use
Save changes
Step 6 - Make links to the forum
All the forum pages are now created, but there are not yet any links that lead to them. It is best, then, to add links to the forum pages.
Simply include links to forum:start and forum:recent-posts somewhere, e.g. copy this code:
+ Forum
* [[[forum | Forum]]]
* [[[forum-posts | Recent posts]]]
to your side bar (located at nav:side by default).
Or if you use the top-bar pull-down menu, you can insert:
* [[[forum | Forum]]]
* [[[forum | View categories]]]
* [[[forum-posts | Recent posts]]]
to the top-bar source page which is by default located at nav:top.
Sat Dec 26, 2015 10:23 pm