As my test site is going to be a community, we need somewhere to hang out and exchange views and ideas, the ideal place is a forum.

In the “Setup” wizard I opted to create a community and ocPortal included a forum for me, you will recall in the last tutorial that I added a link button to it from our Front page.

I now have two link options to get to my forum. The button I created or the “Social” link near the top of my page.

Clicking either link will take me to the forums page and the forum is split into two sections. General and Staff. For now we will concern ourselves with General.

Under the General section two forums have been created General chat and Website comment topics each has an edit link alongside.

Let’s click on the edit link next to General chat, in your editor you will see the forum ready for editing.

I am going to add a description so users know what the forum is about and the type of posts that are expected.

Which when saved will look like this.

For now click save as many of the other options will be covered in the next bit of the tutorial. Upon saving our changes you will see the Edit forum page in your admin zone.

I want to add a forum called ocPortal templates.

Click add forum and fill in the form.

Name.

The name we want to give the forum in my case I will call it “ocPortal templates”

Description.

A short description of what the forum is about like we did before when editing General chat.

Grouping.

I want everyone to see so I will leave it as General.

Parent.

I want the forum to be a part of the existing so will leave the Parent selection as Forum home. (We will look at Parent in more detail soon.)

For now we will skip the Advanced and Permission settings but they will be covered in the next tutorial.

Click Save!

So now when you view your site, you should see the changes.

And when you click on the forum.

To test I can click on “add topic” and create a form post.

You can add an attachment or add pictures to your post as well as format the text and add linking too. When you have finished click the “add topic” button

Here is the post.

In the next tutorial we will add a sub category to our forum.

There is no limit to the amount of forums or sub forums you can create but before you jump in, do consider your users and the user experience.

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