Day 30- How to use Joomla! as Forum

So my last article in the series of setting websites with Joomla! in 30 days will end with this article. As in my previous article I have written about Joomla as Blog. Today am going to write on, How we will use joomla as forum , For that we need to instalI one or more extensions from Joomla’s vast repository. You may have to activate the Legacy Plugin in the Plugin Manager menu so that the forum related extensions can work properly.
First I’m taking the example of fireboard, one of the most famous forum extension for Joomla!.

Following are the features of FireBoard :

• User-defined nesting forum categories

• As many forums as you want with access rights

• User profiles and user avatars

• Upload of files and images for a forum entry

Setting Up a Forum

Here I will explain how to set up forum into joomla.

After the installation of Fireboard software, I will set up a category first, which will act as a container around the forums contained inside. After creating category, I will set up the actual forum, which I can then assign to that category.

Now I have the category and the forum. The forum is still a little indented to the right in order to symbolize the connection. So still I have to explicitly publish the category and the forum.

Am done with the basic tasks for integrating a forum into my website. Let’s take look how to integrate into Website!!

How to Integrate into Website

• Now after setting up the forum and site an curious to  set up a Forum link in the Joomla! 1.5 menu. To do this, I have clicked  Menu | Joomla 1.5 | New at joomla backend. It take  to me  menu item selection. It now has one more item. I will click on Fireboard Forum as installed earlier.

• This menu link opens edit screen where I have given title and alias name. Now I will click on save button at top right.
• Now I will reboot site and I can see Ahaaaaa My new forum!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would also like to share with you name of component and modules used to integrate forum into joomla.Let’s take a look with me.

• JFusion 1.2.0 Release Candidate has been released. Now get full control over integrating multiple softwares at the same time, with the new master/slave capabilities. JFusion is a free GPL plugin for the award winning Content Management System (CMS) Joomla. JFusion provides universal user integration, by extending the Joomla 1.5 user authentication framework without any core hacks. JFusion does not support every software out-of-the-box, but is designed for people to easily write a plugin to create a bridge, without re-inventing the wheel.

• Joo!BB stands for Joomla! Bulletin Board. It is a highly customizable, fully Joomla! integrated forum software based on Joo!CM (Joomla! Community Manager).

• redEVENT is a brand new Joomla 1.5 native MVC event component. Build over the popular but yet limited event component eventlist, the redEVENT fork along with its 100% integration to redFORM has taken the ease and flexibility of creating and managing events and bookings to a whole new level.

• The Simplest Forum core is kept very simple and very basic so that it is easily installed and used with little effort. The forum is, however, powered by a flexible plugin system which enables standard Joomla! plugins to extend its functionality considerably.
  

• Rapid Forum is threaded discussion forum displayed in reverse chronological order. All posts and nested replies filter through a single screen like Twitter or blog.

That’s not the end. We’ll be writing on various aspects of joomla in coming days as well. That all depends upon what we need and what are the problems we encounter during our working with Joomla!. Have a nice time and keep visiting to read new articles enriched with knowledge base of Joomla!.