Welcome to one of the most interesting features in Tiki: the forums system, the concepts are very simple:

• A forum is a collection of topics (also called threads) about a subject. You can have a forum to discuss a product, movies, sports, the weather; anything you think of.
• A topic/thread is a collection of messages (also called posts) in a particular forum.
• A post/message is a message a user has submitted about a particular topic.

The forums menu in the application menu displays 2 links, one to the forum listing and another to the forum rankings. If you are admin you will be able to configure forums from the admin-forums screen in the administration menu. Let's go to the admin forums screen to create a forum:

Creating/editing forums

The admin forums screen show a list of available forums and a form to create/edit a new forum, the form has the following format:

The fields are described next:

Once a forum is created you can see it displayed in the listing:

The edit link can be used to edit the forum while the perms link can be used to set-up individual permissions for the forum.

Using the forum

As a user you can enter the forums section clicking the forums link in the application menu.

You can order the forum listing as you want and you can click on the forum name to enter the forum.

When you enter to a forum a list of topics will be displayed:

Topics are listed using the default ordering for topics set for the forum, as a user you can order the topics by any of the fields in the topic listing. The type is used to classify topics (more on this later). When the type icon is shown reddish (as in this case) the topic is new for the user. If you have the permission to post a topic you will see a link to display/hide the form to post a new topic. This is the form when displayed:

You will have to enter the title for the topic, the type and the comment (the topic text), you can use some smileys shown at the right if you want. The topic-type that you can set will be normal unless you are an admin for this forum, in which case you can use any type. Topics type are described next:

Type	Icon	Description
Normal		A normal topic
Hot		A hot topic, a topic that is very important or polemical or anything you consider hot
Announce		An announcement
Sticky		A sticky topic will be displayed on top of the list of topics regardless of the ordering selected for topics.
Locked		A locked topic is a topic where users cannot post messages, admins can lock a topic by changing the type of any topic to locked

If you click on the topic name for any topic a list of topic messages will be displayed:

From this screen you can post new messages (if you have the permission), edit or remove messages (again if you have the permission) and quote a message if you want. The form to post a message for a topic is almost indentical to the form used to post a new topic.

The toolbar can be used to sort messages by date, score or title, limit the minimum score for a message to be displayed (threshold) or find messages containing some word.

Setting Global forum permissions

From the admin groups screen you can set up the global permissions for the forums:

Setting Individual permissions for a forum

From the admin forums screen you can click on the perms link to set up individual permissions for a forum.

Setting individual permissions can be used to have private forums, to control who can post new topics in some special forums, to give admin privileges to a group of user only for some forums, etc. As usual when individual permissions are set for a forum global permissions don t apply.

Forum Rankings

The forum rankings screen can be used to display rankings for the forums.

Visit our forums right here: tikiwiki.org forums!

This page is for the latest released stable version or release candidate(not stuff in CVS).

Who is working here generally?

• UserPagepatvdv