Ok so you want a forum to display inside your site? Great - ah but hang on - what about google and crawlers? What if someone links directly to the forum which isn't a part of your site? How can you stick a load of meta tags on your forum to advertise it if the visitors are not going to see your site? Well there are a number of ways around this and a 'resizeable' forum is one of them? What then is a resizable forum? First things first though?
1. Will the forum function fine inside an iframe. Many will not allow login or out because of the need for cookies. When forums are displayed inside iframes the cookies are sometimes not picked up properly resulting in an inability to login. Plenty will function fine though including phpbb and minbb (which I am using at the moment). You can though display the forum without the need for iframes by using headers and footers but for now I want to talk about iframes.
2. Are you able to alter the files so you can place links in the forum - such as the header file? Should be easy this but isn't in some cases. Dead easy in the phpbb/minibb - and others though I have tried. Some are just nasty.
Ok the above 2 are as they should be so how do you go about making them resizable? Not hard really. When you construct your site with an iframe in it (or using headers/footers) to display the forum you have infact a file that can be detached from the rest of the site. Think about this a minute. You have an index file that loads an iframe with a link for the forum. You are still using the index file ofcourse. All you have to do though is copy the index file and then rename it whilst altering the iframe settings to make it display the forum. Then on the forum itself link directly to this new file with a link that says something like 'View Small Screen Forum' - or ' Visit Some Site'. On the forum itself you can then have 2 links - one for full screen viewing and one for small screen viewing. Complicated? Not really and you can see it working here:
Full screen forum
Click the small screen forum link to see the forum inside my site. Is that neat or wot?
1. Will the forum function fine inside an iframe. Many will not allow login or out because of the need for cookies. When forums are displayed inside iframes the cookies are sometimes not picked up properly resulting in an inability to login. Plenty will function fine though including phpbb and minbb (which I am using at the moment). You can though display the forum without the need for iframes by using headers and footers but for now I want to talk about iframes.
2. Are you able to alter the files so you can place links in the forum - such as the header file? Should be easy this but isn't in some cases. Dead easy in the phpbb/minibb - and others though I have tried. Some are just nasty.
Ok the above 2 are as they should be so how do you go about making them resizable? Not hard really. When you construct your site with an iframe in it (or using headers/footers) to display the forum you have infact a file that can be detached from the rest of the site. Think about this a minute. You have an index file that loads an iframe with a link for the forum. You are still using the index file ofcourse. All you have to do though is copy the index file and then rename it whilst altering the iframe settings to make it display the forum. Then on the forum itself link directly to this new file with a link that says something like 'View Small Screen Forum' - or ' Visit Some Site'. On the forum itself you can then have 2 links - one for full screen viewing and one for small screen viewing. Complicated? Not really and you can see it working here:
Full screen forum
Click the small screen forum link to see the forum inside my site. Is that neat or wot?