Moving forum from root to /forum

Moddis

Active member
Has a live forum for about a month now.. However, when clicking the home button I get taken back to the forum home. I don't expect any different because I don't have another home page.

Is it recommended to put the forum software into /forum rather then the root so that if i decide to have a home page, I wont have any issues? Is there another way to have a home page (on same domain) without moving forum to /forum ?

BTW, I went with putting forum in root because the domain name itself already have the word forum so it would see much redundant to have such a name: www.siteforum.com/forum
 
There are add-ons that will help you create a "home" page. Some of them include:

XenPorta, Widget Portal, Simple Portal.

Also, in XenForo 1.2 you can do some cool stuff that should allow you to leverage the default Pages system to give yourself a static homepage.

There are no recommendations as to where you should place your forum. If you have no plans to use a third party system such as WordPress or some other content management system for your home page, then it being in the root is absolutely fine. It's completely down to personal preference.

And, if you make the wrong decision now, it doesn't really matter because you can move your forum any time. It's really easy to do.
 
Cool, sounds like the only issue I would(if I have a home and forum option) have is writing a rewrite rule to redirect all root traffic to /forum/*.

Will wait to get my hands on 1.2 and see if i can make one of the suggested mods work for me.

Thanks!
 
@Moddis I have had a separate XF Page as my homepage for a long time already.
It needs an addon called Nodes as Tabs which I strongly recommend anyway to manage your navbars.
1. Create a new node Page and name it Home.
2. With NaT installed this node has option to Display As Tab.
3. Tab Display Order: [1] Tab Position: Home.
Done.
If you want NaT also lets you add secondary tabs so your Home tab has a dropdown, with your choice of links: could be the Forums list + Newcomers Page + Member account section + Search
anything yu like. Or just have the Home tab. NaT is an amzingly powerful navtabs manager.

On the root install issue your XF directory does not need to be called "forums" it can be any word or charcater combi, so that makes a more flexible decision perhaps.
Keeping your root clear for other scripts or static pages in years to come has its points. Althogh changing it is easy later I would prefer to get the URL to the forums established for visitor bookmarks right away.
A forum directory could be -
\members, \club, \discuss, \circle, \people, gathering, \conference, \chat, \re, \web, \support, \academy
just to give you an idea.
 
Ok I think a good name for the forum directory would be /discussions/ although it seems a bit to long and would rather use /discuss/. However, I think people refer to forums often as discussions and discuss sounds weird.

EDIT: nah, community sounds better.
 
Oh i just noticed something very interesting......
When I go to a thread the link looks like this: siteforum.com/forums/thread.111/

So if i put my forum in directory called /forum the link will look like... siteforum.com/forum/forums/thread.111/

heh, definitely not naming ot forum to have that word repeat 3 times in a url:)
 
I like community and forum as well. They're both commonly used.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet but you can also just remove the home URL you have setup in your Basic Boards Options and it will remove the Home tab on your Navigation bar.

Untitled.webp
 
I cant seem to change the default index page for the forum home. I went to options> Index Page Route and typed in /random but the forum home actually chnaged to site.com/forums. No matter what I type in the "Index Page Route" field, it takes me to the same /forums directory. If I leave it blank then it gives me back the default forums directory in root (site.com/)

Could I be doing something wrong or could this be a 1.2 beta bug?

Thanks!
 
I went to options> Index Page Route and typed in /random but the forum home actually chnaged to site.com/forums. No matter what I type in the "Index Page Route" field, it takes me to the same /forums directory.
I'm confused as that's entirely expected. That option changes what is displayed on the index page -- site.com. By default, it's forums/ (which is the forum list), but if you change it, then the forum list will be displayed at site.com/forums (and what was site.com/random is now site.com).
 
I'm confused as that's entirely expected. That option changes what is displayed on the index page -- site.com. By default, it's forums/ (which is the forum list), but if you change it, then the forum list will be displayed at site.com/forums (and what was site.com/random is now site.com).


Ok so by default my site is in the root directory and link to forum is www.site.com (not site.com/forum)
I was playing around with xenporta and put that as the home page (www.site.com) and wanted to change the actual forums to www.site.com/community.

When I typed in "/communities" in Index Page Route filed, the new forum page was now www.site.com/forums instead of the expectected www.site.com/communities

I thought that was possible to do without actually creating a "/communities" directory and dragging all the forum files in there.

Thanks!
 
That's the role of route filters (forums/ to communities/) - not the index route. The index route is what controls the display at site.com.
 
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