Why Use Forums in Your Community?

As you may have experienced over the years, forums were the first real community knowledge sharing platform to be hosted on the Internet. In recent years Groups have been made popular by the big social platforms in the market by introducing a social component minimizing the use of forum style layouts. You still find a presence and a need for forum setups in more formal environments and if you are appealing to existing forum users. 

We have made discussion forums look beautiful and modern in BuddyBoss theme, and also highly configurable in terms of their layout. You can select style options, add a banner area to the forums index, and more. In this tutorial, you will learn what you can do with your forums.

Configure Forums

Step 1

First of all proceed to BuddyBoss - Components. Activate the Forum Discussions. This allows members to have discussions using Q&A style messaging boards. Forums can be standalone or connected to social groups. 

If you go to your forums section of BuddyBoss platform, you will see the default Card view of your forum. Let’s see how you can configure the view settings. 

Step 2

Navigate to BuddyBoss - Theme Options - Forums. Under Forum Grids select the Cover style and click Save Changes. 

Refresh the frontend and see that each forum is in cover mode. 

Now turn on the Show Forum Banner, Upload a picture in the Custom Banner Image section. 

Here you can also customize the Background Overlay Color and Background Overlay Opacity. Adjusting the Banner Text Color is mandatory, so you will have that option as well. Your Forum section must have a Title and Description, edit them here. And, lastly if you turn on the Enable Search option then the search bar will show in the banner for easy navigation of any desired forum. Please don’t forget to press the Save Changes button.

After reloading the frontend you will see the banner image, title, description, and search bar. To set the Background Overlay Opacity, you can change it in the backend, click the Save Changes button, and check it in the frontend to get your desired design. Same goes for the Banner Text Color. 

This is the simple configuration of BuddyBoss Forums. 

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