Multiple linked forums - my little forum

I just want to say what a great forum this is and to confirm that, contrary to what some believe, the thread-based message board is still very much in demand.

So I have one big question - I would like to create say 10 forums, all linked, so that a user could post on any of the 10 forums. A small community really. Generally the forums would have the same appearance and operation, although basic colours and branding may change for each one.

Would someone be able to start me on the right direction in achieving this please? Any other detail you need then just shout...

Thanks in advance

Andy

Ok, after looking into this a bit more - I can see that having multiple categories may be part of a solution - however would someone be able to explain if it's possible to customise the colours and maybe an image of each category? Thus creating distinctive messageboards but still with the same userbase.

Thank you

At the risk of talking to myself (sorry but its therapeutic :-) ), can someone confirm if this is still the best way forward...

3690

Hello

At the risk of talking to myself (sorry but its therapeutic ), can someone confirm if this is still the best way forward...

3690

Yes, that's a way to go. The other one would be to use categories.

To extend the first (preferred) way: Alex's example uses shared user table and user cache table. Your explanation suggests, that all forums/boards will be used by the same community. In this case it seems to be useful to unify the tables for smilies and banlists to.

To answer the other question, in case of use of different categories you can set a class i.e. for the HTML element body, a single name for every single category. So you can handle the background colours and any other CSS rule category dependant.

Attention: This will blow your stylesheet up.

If you use different installations for every forum/board, you can specify i.e. colours in the CSS file of the installation.

Tschö, Auge

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Trenne niemals Müll, denn er hat nur eine Silbe!

Thanks Auge, that's much appreciated. As is all the work that you and friends have put into this superb little forum.

I will definitely go down the option of different installs, and link to different CSS files.

Therefore there's just one last question: Once installed in a different folder, would it then be ok to amend it so that the install then links back to just the one set of the other folders, i.e - lang,themes,modules,etc - rather than have a duplicate set for each forum, so that I have a 'neater' file structure.

Or is that asking for trouble?! :-D

Thanks in advance.

Hello

I will definitely go down the option of different installs, and link to different CSS files.

Each installation will automatically have it's own CSS file.

Therefore there's just one last question: Once installed in a different folder, would it then be ok to amend it so that the install then links back to just the one set of the other folders, i.e - lang,themes,modules,etc - rather than have a duplicate set for each forum, so that I have a 'neater' file structure.

It is safe to use the same language and (external) modules files/folders if there are no differences between the installations. You can use a single base for JavaScript files too (folder js). Different to that the themes folder contains the CSS file for the installation. And yes, that could lead into trouble.

Tschö, Auge

--
Trenne niemals Müll, denn er hat nur eine Silbe!

Great, that's all I needed to know (for now ;-) ), a donation will be winging its way to you shortly :-)

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