Hello

Is there a good design which gives a more obvious idea of different categories? The drop-down box is not clear enough for my purposes.

You can build a List of the categories as a link list and show this list instead, above or under the list of the last n postings.

it would be great if it was possible to have a forum 'homepage' which lists the various categories like more traditional forum software.

It was (and should be until now) an intention of the software to keep and leave anything simple. Thatswhy the script has no "homepage" with all the categories. But it should be possible to have such a page.

*btw*
"Traditional forum softwares" had never had such pages (exceptions proves the rule). You mean boards (flat view) instead of forums (threaded view).

Tschö, Auge

Yes it did occur to me in the end that I could manually create a page which links to each of the categories in whatever style I like.

In some ways that is actually a better solution because it gives complete control over the forum 'homepage' :)