Take some time to read this information before starting to use the administration of your forum:

How to access your administration panel ?
In the top menu, click on Log In, a new page is displayed. Fill in the username "admin" and the password you have choosen during your registration. If you have lost or forgot it, click here. Once you are logged in, click on the link "Administration Panel" at the bottom of the page.

How to modify your board's appearance ?
You can modify your board's appearance by choosing a theme (each theme displays different pictures, colors and icons). To do that, go to the administration panel, then click on Management in the Styles Admin menu and choose one of the displayed themes. You can later change it or choose another one.

How to manage the categories and forums ?
You can add, modify and delete the categories and forums that you have created anytime and without limit. To do that, go to the administration panel, in the management part of the Forum Admin, and click on "Add a link" (a forum or a category). In a first time, we advice you to create test categories and test forums that you will delete later, in order to understand how this tool works.

What is blogs?
 A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser
 A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links
 From “Web log.” A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”‘
 A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc
 A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly
 A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences
 Not all blogs use comments - but most do. This blog is not a monologue but a conversation.
 A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.






What is forum?
 An Internet forum is a discussion area on a website. Website members can post discussions and read and respond to posts by other forum members. An Internet forum can be focused on nearly any subject and a sense of an online community, or virtual community, tends to develop among forum members.
 An Internet forum is also called a message board, discussion group, bulletin board or web forum. However, it differs from a blog, the name for a web log, as a blog is usually written by one user and usually only allows for the responses of others to the blog material. An Internet forum usually allows all members to make posts and start new topics.
 An Internet forum is also different from a chat room. Members in a chat room usually all chat or communicate at the same time, while members in an Internet forum post messages to be read by others whenever they happen to log on. Internet forums also tend to be more topic-focused than chat rooms.
 An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site.[1] It is the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications managing user-generated content
 People participating in an Internet forum can build bonds with each other and interest groups will easily form around a topic's discussion, subjects dealt with in or around sections in the forum.









A Blog is Yours, and A Forum is Not:
With a blog, you set up your account and site, design it to look the way you want it to look, add advertising in some cases, and write regularly. Over time, both by your own design and as a result of what you've written, your blog develops a "personality". You can elect to allow comments or not. Blogs are often devoted to a specific topic, although some are devoted to a number of topics (for example, "All the things I've thought" or "What I did today") that, essentially, are only related by virtue of the fact that the same person wrote them.
A forum belongs to someone else (a company, an online site, a non-profit organization, or anyone who who creates and runs the forum). A forum is a collection of posts offered by the general public, often in a question-and-answer format although some forums are nothing but comments on a post that, itself, was nothing but a comment.
Some forums require contributors to register, which allows them to set preferences with regard to who can contact them, how their posts appear, or whether they receive e.mails when posts are made. Some forums offer separate blogs to go with membership.
There are forums which, for the most, cover topics that are very specific. (I once ran into a Scion forum, which was about nothing but that particular automobile.) Forums are often primarily devoted to one topic (it could be a television show, a disease, a phone model, anything) but will also offer a section for anyone wishing to post on "off-topic" matters.
While a blog may be a collection of one person's writing on something like being the mother of child with autism or else a presidential election, a forum is more a collection of the public's shorter comments on a topic. In a forum for parents of autistic children, for example, a number of people may contribute their questions, thoughts, experiences, or links they believe will be helpful.
Most blogs are created on sites aimed specifically at offering blogging accounts to members, although an individual could obtain his own, individual, website and use it for the purpose of blogging.
By the same token, if one parent starts a blog about having an autistic child (or, say, autism in general), that person will write more extensively, may offer helpful links, may invite the comments of others, etc.; but the focus of the blog will remain on main, contributing, writer.
Forums may place ads on pages, and some even allow for revenue sharing by each contributor. The creator of a blog can arrange to have ads placed on the blog, and those ads can result in earnings for the blog creator.
From the perspective of the person who finds a blog and contributes comments or helpful information, there can, in ways, be little difference between offering helpful information on a forum versus a blog; however, who reads those comments will depend on how popular, well known, and searchable a blog or forum is. Posting a comment on "Fred's Blog About His 2000 Ford Taurus", which you happen to accidentally run into, but which may not get many views, is means your visitor's comment is less likely to be seen than if you posted the same comment on a large, well known, Ford site or forum with a high search engine page rank.
On the other hand, if "Fred" ever finds a way to make his blog more well known and more highly ranking in the search engines, the comment you post on his blog will, of course, be seen by more people.





















Similarities between Blogs and Forum:

Blogs and forums are made of the same content structure (post + comments) but are organised in different visual formats (blogs sort by post date, forums sort by last comment date). To show what I mean, take a look at this basic “forum view” of my blog.
It’s a common request: to have a site with both a blog and forums. There’s a number of ways to approach this:
Install blogging software in one folder, install forum software in another.
You get the best of both pieces of software and all the functionality, yet each needs to be themed so that the site looks like it fits together - each in its own way. Visitors usually have to register for the forum and enter in their details to post a comment in the blog section - not the ideal for usability. If you want to “promote” a forum topic to the home page of your blog, you’ll have to re-post it, generating two places for conversations to occur (unless you turn off comments in the blog). There’s not only often a lack of visual similarities, there’s two different systems for your visitors to learn, and real separation of the content (basic useful information such as merged latest comments are difficult to create). You also have two lots of software to upgrade and maintain. If you change your site’s design, you’ll have to change it in two places.
Hack blog and forum software so they work together
Force the software to use the same login, user and permission information. This can work, although it’s messy and upgrading can be a nightmare. You’ll still have two lots of software to upgrade and maintain. If you change your site’s design, you’ll have to change it in two places (unless you’ve hacked this as well - but that’s highly unlikely given the different templating systems used).
Install software which has both blog and forum functionality.
We’ve used Drupal (wonderful) and XOOPS (not so great). For more solutions, search at CMS Matrix (tick Blog and Discussion Forum features). Drupal is brilliant in that you can categorise blog and forum content using the same taxonomy if you like, there’s RSS feeds for taxomony terms, or forums, or blogs - whatever takes your fancy. You can also promote stories from the forums into the blog - and comments are all kept together. One user system for both, one theme, one lot of software to maintain. Drupal is a lot more flexible than Wordpress but has a steeper learning curve at the beginning.
If you’ve already got a successful blog, the thought of moving platforms in order to accomodate forums can be off-putting.
But wait! Are blogs and forums really that different?
Well… yes and no.
While the appearance (think template), functionality (think format/plugins) and usage are different (see Lee’s insightful article on the difference between blogs and forums), the basic underlying content structure is exactly the same:
Blogs are full of posts and comments, created by authors, organised into categories.
Forums are full of topics and comments created by members, organised into different sub-forums.
They fill different roles and exist side-by-side on sites - indeed we would not want to remove either tool from the community sites we run.
This leads me back to my initial thought: if blogs and forums are made up of the same content underneath, could two different templates be created for a site running on blog software - one for the traditional “blog view” and one for the traditional “forum view”? We would then be back to having one piece of software to maintain, one theme, one user and permissions system.
Wordpress’ permissions system is flexible enough to allow users to add forum topics (blog entries), categorise them and have them displayed in a separate area of the site. A template would handle the display and sorting (by last comment date, rather than by last post date). Note-worthy forum topics could be “promoted” to the home page of the site with meta-tags that only users with a certain permission level (e.g. the blog’s owner) could access.
Of course, some features of forums would not be automatically built in and would need to be made available by way of plugins (e.g. if you wanted threaded comments, you’d grab the plugin discussed recently). User profile pages would substitute in for forum member pages.
On the other hand, many forum software systems are bloated with features which can be daunting for new users and full of heavy-to-load pages. Vanilla is an obvious exception - but have a closer look… how different is that from a blog… really?
Once again, would appreciate your thoughts!





Differences between Blog and Forum:
I’ve written a number of times before about integrating blogs and forums and the similarities between the two and we recently had the opportunity to add a simple forum to a Wordpress blog over at The Fight.
Everything you see in the forum has been done using Wordpress and the implementation time is actually incredibly quick.
Instead of having to install, configure and maintain a separate piece of software (and integrate the design), just three new theme templates were created: one for the main forum page, one for the threads and one for the comments form.
Logins are handled using the Wordpress login system and comment moderation becomes simple for the administrator - for not very active forums, they can receive all comments via email, use Akismet or other spam protection (in addition on that forum, only registered members may add comments).
In this forum, currently only administrators may add new topics and subtopics - but this can be changed using the different user levels. What’s also quite nice is that the built in search can work across the entire site.
Additional features such as user profiles with contact forms could quickly be added thanks to Wordpress and common contact forum plugins.
Adding a forum like this is certainly not for every site, but should be on your options if you’re after something very simple.