Other Features¶
Re-Synchronize Forums¶
At the bottom of the main Forum Management page there is a “Re-synchronize Forums” link. If for some reason the forums get out of order as far as their assignment to a particular category goes, you can use this link to re-synchronized them. This feature is almost never needed, but it is available if necessary.
Using PHP in the Forum Templates¶
You can enable PHP to be used in the Forum Templates if you wish. This is done under Default Preferences. You can do this if you wish to include other PHP scripts, such as banner ads. As with regular ExpressionEngine Templates, you can choose whether the PHP is executed on “Input” or “Output”.
Running the Forums Through Regular Templates¶
By default, the Forum Module utilizes its own light-weight template display engine, rather than utilizing main templating system in ExpressionEngine. The consequence of this, though, is that you can’t use general EE Tags, global variables, conditionals, or similar in the forum templates since they won’t be parsed.
In the Default Preferences you set a “triggering” word for the forums, which by default is “forums”. When the trigger word is encountered in the URL by ExpressionEngine, your forums will display. Your trigger word cannot be the same as any existing Template Group name.
If you absolutely must, there is a way to run your Forum through the standard EE template engine:
Create a Template as normal in the main Templates tab of the Control Panel. Name it as you want.
Inside that new Template, place this code and only this code:
{exp:forum}
If you have multiple forums, you can specify which forum to load using the “board” parameter, like so:
{exp:forum board="board_name"}
Your forum will then be run inside the regular EE template engine, which means that you can include standard EE Tags in the forum theme Templates. The forum is then accessed through whichever Template you created above, so the Template name is used in place of the “trigger” word mentioned earlier. Note that due to the nature of forum URLs, segment globals are not parsed when used in the forum templates.
The down side of this approach is that it adds more processing overhead, so it’s not recommended unless users really need this capability. Since the forum can’t be cached, on very busy sites this can create some unwanted server load.
Do not cache the Template you create for the forum. If you do so, your forum will not behave dynamically.
User Contributed Notes
As noted below, the forum template parser does have certain limitations on what it can show. We skirted the documentation and placed a forum header above the {exp:forum} tag in order to keep the site’s appearance consistent. Note that you should watch for certain special pages, such as the emoticons pop-up URL, if you do the same.
{if segment_2 != 'smileys'}{!-- header content here --}
{/if}
Make certain that you do not display any user or channel content on that URL. If needed, move such references to embedded templates (despite the heavier performance hit) and stash the reference within an {if} conditional. The forums’s “Smileys” pop-up window will fail to display your smileys if you should use a tag that references them—even indirectly. For instance, the {exp:user:stats} tag will mess them up and give you PHP errors.
There is some room to play, but be warned that the consequences will be bizarre if you disregard the warnings in the docs.
Beware that when “running the forums through regular templates” you may run into issues with 3rd party add-ons not working in some of the forum templates.
In my experience, they worked ok in the forum screens, but output only whitespace in the user profile screens. EllisLab says they should work, but it’s up to add-on devs to support. So, your mileage may vary.
If using the forum with MSM and trying to run it through your regular templates, you’ll need to add {exp:forum board=“yourmsmboardname”} into the regular {exp:forum} tag - otherwise your forum will just pull all the content from the main board.
You must either have an EllisLab product license and have attained a forum rank of "Lab Assistant" (50 posts) to contribute notes to the User Guide