Guide to the Administration Panel

[Alex]

Okay, so Forumotion's Admin Panel isn't really the most intuitive thing ever.  

The stuff you think should be grouped together never is.  I've been helping admin a site for three years now, and I often find myself knowing what I want to tweak, and then having to trawl through the entire Admin Panel because I can't find where it's hidden.

Below is a quick overview of what stuff is where, so you (and I) don't get lost.

Home

This is where you land when you first open the Admin Panel, and to be honest, it's a bit of nothing.  I always skip past this page, if that tells you anything.

There are a bunch of warnings here that, if you've ever been on the internet, you probably already know.  The part about how to enhance your traffic might be useful if you've never run a site before, but I'll go over that in more detail in another thread.  

One thing you will probably want to do is look at the top left corner under the welcome notice, and switch your Admin Panel to Advanced mode.  Don't be intimidated, it's actually easier to work with.

General

Where you set up the forum itself, and configure your post and message settings.  You can think of this as the foundation of the forum.  There's a sidebar on the left so you can skip between options easily.  

Some Tips

To get rid of that ugly "Free Forum:" in your site's title, go to Forum > Configuration and delete it from in front of your site's name.

To close your site while you're setting it up, while still in Configuration, scroll down to below where it says under construction, and put your site into holiday mode.  Construction mode lasts a maximum of 7 days, whereas holiday mode lasts until you turn it off.

Display

This is where the weirdness of Forumotion comes into play.  Most of this section is your site's skin options, but then you have the Homepage section, which has stuff in it like whether you want to use a portal view for your landing page, whether you want to split the categories on the forum's front page, and how you want to configure the navigation bar.

Everything else is basically skinning.

You can also modify your forum templates from in here, but only if you're on the founder account.  That is, the one that set the forum up.

Users & Groups

If you're running an RP there are three main things you'll use this part of the forum for.

• Searching users.  You can only search by username or email, unlike on other forum softwares where you can also search by IP address.
  
• User groups.  Use these to give different groups different permissions in the forums.
  
• User ranks.  If a user (or character) doesn't need their permissions changed, but they have a different status, you can use this instead.
  

Modules

This is seems to be where Forumotion stores anything that's optional. If you can turn it off, they put it in here. So that dropdown navigation bar (that I don't have turned on) has ended up in here instead of in the Display section where I always expect it to be. See? I told you this thing was confusing.

You can make yourself a nice sidebar for your forum through the forum widgets management.

At the very bottom of the page, there's also the option for adding webpages and javascript.

Misc

There is nothing really worth looking at here.