ivson wrote
But there are so many choices under both "Color" and "Preferences" that my first reaction as someone new to all this is knots in the stomach!
As I said, it's best just to experiment. On colour, I suggest this approach:
Return to the default colours by clicking the "Restore Defaults" button at the bottom of the Colour dialogue. Then click the "Colour Schemes" button at the top left. A drop down list appears showing a number of named predefined colour schemes, starting with "Default". A horizontal bar shows the colours that will be used. You'll notice how that top horizontal row matches all the colours on the main dialogue working from top to bottom.
Click on any of the other colour schemes then click the "Apply" button to change the colours of your forum. (You can always restore the defaults if you don't like the result.) Then try to generate the various items mentioned in the list by creating different objects, that may have different backgrounds, text, links, borders, etc (i.e. create new topics, replies, insert images in some, and so on). After your various tests return to the main and topic screens, to see the results. Maybe you'll even encounter error and information boxes along the way!
You may find that some colours never appear as I believe some features may not be seen in a standard "Forum", but only in other applications, such as "News" or a "Blog".
If you want a highly customised colour scheme, you should be aware the codes in the colour boxes are hexadecimal numbers, representing the colours. With two digits (in the range 00-FF) each to represent the red, green and blue component of any colour. So bright red is shown as FF0000, bright green as 00FF00 and bright blue 0000FF. White is FFFFFF and Black 000000. You can enter any valid value you like in the boxes, (digits run from 0-9 and then the letters A-F) or by clicking in a colour box open a palette which you can click on to pick a colour.
On the preferences dialogue:
Having created your forum, what the items in the top section control should be obvious, except for:
Page Layout:
Selecting "Narrow" optimises a Forum's appearance (and some other applications) for a narrow window, removing the "Views" column displayed in the Home screen of each forum or sub-forum. In other applications (e.g. Blog, News and Gallery) it removes the sidebar.
In the "Topics per Page" section reduce the default number of posts for a Forum (35) to 10 and then post at least a dozen different new topics to see pagination taking effect.)
Of the three forms of display of the contents of topics posted (Classic, List and Threaded) only Classic has options you can select:
Picture Size:
Allows you to select a small avatar rather than the large one shown on this forum
Post per page:
Controls the number of replies shown to a new topic before pagination occurs
As the information indicates the final section only has an effect once you introduce sub-forums. Essentially, it changes the default view of your forum to "Topics" View" from "Main Page".
There's a lot more you can customise, but that requires some knowledge of CSS (cascading stylesheets). See some of my stuff at:
http://www.seahawk17.plus.com/forum.htm (A Mixed application, with mainly forums as sub-applications)
or
http://www.gregafloat.plus.com/blog/index.html (A News application, set to "Narrow" so it loses the default sidebar.)
Volunteer Helper - but recommending that users move off the platform!
Once the admin for GregHelp now deleted.
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