Creating Forums

A discussion forum allows users and visitors of your website to hold on-line discussions and is a great way to add vitality to, and therefore maintain visitors' interest in, your website.

First of all you need to create some forums. You'll need at least one forum if you'd like users to be able to hold on-line discussions, and you will probably want more than one forum to help better organise particular discussions into their relevant forums.

To create some forums you need to log in as webadmin and then open up the 'administer' pane on the the control panel, then click on the 'forums' icon.

On the forums administration page, you'll notice that there are currently no forums on your website. To create your first forum, click on the 'add forum' tab.

Now a page will load, prompting you to describe your new forum. Enter a name and description for your forum and then, as in the previous scenarios, click the 'submit' button to finalise your changes.

Now, you can see your forum has been created. Repeat the previous steps to create another forum. Now you can see all of your new forums.

Forum Containers

As described before, a forum is a container of potentially many discussions that are somehow related to one another (e.g. discussions about food, travel, pets, problems, etc.). In the same way that a forum can contain discussions, a container can contain related forums. You can add forum containers in the same way that you add forums only you need to click 'add container' on the forum management page. Usually you will only want to use forum containers if you intend to have a very large set of forums. The beauty of the Drupal system is that, like menus, forums and containers can be effortlessly reorganised at a later stage.

Posting a topic

Now that you have created some forums as the webadmin user, log out as that user and then log in as a basic user to see how they can use the forum. To access the forums that you created, locate the forums item on your site's main menu and click it.

Now, on the forums screen, click on the title of the forum that you would like to start a discussion on.

Notice that there are currently no discussions in the forum; it's not very interesting yet, but it will be when lots of people start to post topics and replies to topics. The options here are quite self explanatory – if you are ever unsure of what something does, it's usually quite safe to click it and see: 'my discussions' will list discussions in the forum that you have been engaged in, to help you to quickly find them; 'active discussions' will list the most active discussions in the forum; and 'post new forum topic' will allow you to do just that. Click on 'post new forum topic' to create your first topic in this forum.

This screen should now look familiar – it's very similar to the screen for editing a website page. Enter a short descriptive subject for the topic you are posting, then fill out the body text – and pictures if you like, and then click the 'submit' button to save you new discussion topic into the forum.

Now, you can see that your topic has been added to the discussion.

Posting a reply

Now that you have created a topic on a forum, to demonstrate how replies may be made, log out as the basic user and log in as a user with the editor role.

Navigate back to the forums screen, by clicking on the forums item of the main menu, and then click on the forum with the recent posting made by the basic user. On the topic screen, click 'add new comment' to post a reply. Note that, as a privileged editor user, you could edit or delete the original post if appropriate.