Manage forums, threads, posts and users

There are two places to manage forums: The forums overview tool in the Admin CP and the forums list itself. The forums overview shows a structured list of all forums in their correct order. You can rename them, change their order and link them anywhere else as sub-forums. The “Save” button at the bottom stores all changes and displays an updated list. There’s a chance you incorrectly link a forum and it won’t be visible again in any forum. Don’t panic then, all of them are located at this list’s end so you can change their parent forum IDs and repair the association. There’s a checkbox available to delete multiple forums in one step.

The more comfortable way for little changes, and the only way to create new forums, is the according functions in the forums list. You may have noticed the little edit and add buttons next to each forum or the “Create new forum” link at the end. These bring up a new form where you can enter or change the forum name, flags, an optional description, an optional link URL and a sort index. The name will be displayed as link and used for notifications. There are two options for forums. A category is a normal forum except that you cannot post in it; it can only contain other sub-forums and is displayed in a different style. A Web Link creates no actual forum but displays a link to another page in this place; you can use this to link to other board systems as a logical part of this board, for example. The description is displayed below the name and can contain BBCode to set another text style, colour, build links or insert manual newlines. If you checked the Web Link option, you need to provide a target URL to point to. The Order field can be left empty, it will then be filled with the highest value in this level plus one, so the new entry gets added to the end. Sort indices need not be unique, but it’s recommended for an absolutely foreseeable sorting.

Threads are created by users when they begin a new topic. A new thread automatically contains at least one post. The new post must have a subject set, which will be taken for the thread’s subject, too. If you change the subject of the first post in a thread, this will also change the thread name. There’s also a way to modify threads directly from the threads list (again, the little edit button), which shows a form similar to the one for forums. You can change all directly thread-related data here: Subject (will not change the first post’s subject), description, close thread or mark it as important (also called sticky) and move it to another forum (optionally with a time-limited “This was moved” stub thread remaining). You also have the possibility to entirely remove a thread and all its posts from here.

There’s not much administrating with posts.
TODO: attachments (allowed filename extensions), polls

TODO: Users list, user groups, removing users, registration policy