Omnibasis has all your need to create and build an enjoyable forum experience to foster community engagement with discussion boards, membership management, multi-media content, notifications and all the administrator tools you need.

In this video we will help you to learn how to create deeper connections with customers via forum discussions, manage community membership directory, profiles and interactions, and monetize your community with video, image and text advertising.

Communities are built around the forums that are used to discuss various topics by your community. You want to seed your community with discussions. Let us create a forum. We will use Collections to help us to create forums.

First, lets navigate to omniContent / Collections and open list of collections. 

Click Create from the action menu to create a new collection.


  1. Set Status to active.
  2. Select Type of a collection. Type helps to customize your collection for a specific type of content. We will choose Forum.
  3. Enter a Title for this forum, we choose Dolphin Adventures Forum.
  4. Select Language that identifies a primary language for a forum.
  5. Enter a Short description about the collection. We choose share stories, ideas, picture and more.
  6. Enter a full Description, it will appear in detailed view for this forum.
  7. Use Labels to help you group the forums by different labels and search for forum on your site.
  8. We want to track analytics for our forum, so we choose View Analytics Tracking.
  9. You can use Search Optimization to edit the way that a forum appears in search results on the forum's details page. If you do not enter any information, a default forum name and short description will be used.
  10. Click Create to create a new forum.

 

Media Files


Once you create a Collection, you can manage forum Images, Videos, Audio files, and Documents.

 

Navigate to Media Files section. Upload images to give a visual cue to visitors what is this forum about.


Forum content


It is optional to seed forum content. We will use Content section to manage individual forum postings.


Select Content section. 

 

  1. Click Create to create a new content.
  2. Introduce people to your forum, post some rules and themes.

 

Collection Categories


Use categories to organize your forums and display on selected pages.

 

When you create a new category, you have an option to create a unique page on your website which would show all the collections in that category.

 

For this how to video, we already have predefined categories. Select Categories sections.

 

Put checkmark next to Categories for your Forum. Your selection is saved automatically.


Control Forum User Interface 


Next, we will explore how to display collection on site pages.


You can display collection as part of a catalog or on a website page. We used Categories to catalog our forum under Dolphin Adventure category.

 

Next, we will configure who members can view and post messages. 

Navigate to Pages section.


  1. First, we want to display content as an infinite scroll in the list. Select Infinite Scroll List.
  2. Scroll to Submit, and turn on Submit on the same page as a view. It will keep use a simple post view and new posts are submitted on same page as forum view.
  3. Scroll to security section to confiture permission. We want to enable users to subscribe to posts. Select user can subscribe to content option. 
  4. We also want users to opt in for a notification when new post is created. Select user can opt-in for new content notifications. 
  5. In addition, we want to foster community, and ask users to join community membership, turn on User must be a member to view content to ask user to join community. 
  6. We will not require approval of new members, but we will turn on Show members to display members of our community.


If you want to create member only forum, and require users to register to view your forum, select user must be a member to view content. In our case, anyone can view and navigate our forum, it is a public forum. 

To enable users to post messages, turn on allow user to create. We want to monitor content posting and approve them before they appear, we will turn on require approval of new content. 

When new content is posted, notification for approval will be sent. You can configure emails notifications in Notify about new data to this email field.


Reviews

Next we will configure how our visitors can engage in commenting on forum topics. 

Navigate to Reviews section. Here we can override default settings for our Forum.


We will turn off star rating, place X in Collections: show star rating and Content: show star rating. We also do not want headlines in reviews post, we turn that feature off.


Collection Recommendations


Lastly, we will explore Collection Recommendations. Use Collection Recommendations to pair related collections together. When collections are connected as recommended, they will be displayed side by side on details page. In our example, we want to cross promote two different forums on our site.

 

Select Recommendations section.

 

  1. Click plus sign Collection to search for collections to add to the list
  2. Select collection you want to add
  3. Optionally you can change an order in which recommended collections appear.

 

Once collections are connected, they will be displayed on the detailed page in recommended section.

 

Forum Preview


If you want to see how your forum will look on a detailed page, click Preview.


Post Messages


Next, we will navigate to Forum details on the page and post a new message.


We will go to a home page, and select Forums from Navigation.


Select Post from action menu at the top right corner to post a new message.


Give it a title, short description, upload optional images, long description if any and click create. Since our forum is moderated, moderator will get a message to approve this post. In our case, we are logged in as moderator, it means our post approved and shows immediately.


Select Follow to follow this forum.


Now we follow this forum and as a member, we can see other members.