Discussion Forums:

Forums are stored in special folders, which plone calls "Forum Folders". The icon for a "Forum Folder" is a folder with an "F". When you navigate to Discussions, the different forums will appear on the left hand navigation bar with a red and blue icon of two people.

When you are on the Discussions home page, you will have a navigation bar with five options: contents, view, edit, properties, add new item and state. Normal users only need to be at view and to use the "add new item". Button. If you are adding a forum to an existing forum folder, navigate to the forum folder and use the "add new item" on the green navigation bar to add a forum.

Forums should only be added when there is a need add an issue that is unrelated to any existing forums.

In general, new topics should be added to existing forums rather than new forums to the Discussion folder.

Once you are "in" a forum the blue navigation bar no longer allows you to "add new item". This prevents a user from convoluting the Web site by storing forums within forums, or engage in other bad practices.

Configuring a forum:

To configure a forum, navigate to the main page of the form (you will see the different topics and announcements down the page). Click on the "edit" button from the tabs over the main content area.  You will be presented with the editing interface, which contains some elements similar to those of other content types (short name, title, description) and also configuration options particular to the forum.  In this area you can configure the forum by using the check boxes and fields for each item. You can save you configuration and verify how it looks in the forum at any time. This area contains the configurations for moderated forum, whether members can subscribe to posts, the number of topics on a page, whether or not to show user information, the default view mode and other options (the options include a brief explanatory text - please refer to the editing interface for more information).

Deleting Topics/Threads in a forum:

You may want to clean up a forum at some point, especially after you finish testing it. This is a very easy task for a forum manager. If you have those permissions and you go the forum page (you see list of forum threads), you will see text under the title of each thread that says "reply" and "delete". Click the delete button. You will get a confirmation screen that lets you know that the message (and any replies) will be deleted. You can cancel at this point if you do not want to delete all (individual replies can be deleted also while you are viewing them).