Owners of a personal or professional forum may have chosen a forum software with a portal functionality. But how exactly should a portal be used, and what features should be enabled at the very basic of portals on forums? Owners of a personal or professional forum should have several features enabled on their portal page of their forum. This portal page may or may not be viewable for guests, depending on the forum permissions that the Owners of a personal or professional forum assigned to guests who view the portal web page.
One feature is to have a welcome box that lists a basic snapshot of activity of the forum community such as any number of announcements, threads, or posts that have been recently created, along with an option for a user of the forum portal web page to view new posts and the today’s current posts for the day on the forum.
Another feature Owners of a personal or professional forum should have on a functioning portal web page of a forum should be a private message panel that shows the number of unread, read, and total messages in the member’s private messaging (pm) account.
Another feature Owners of a personal or professional forum should have on a functioning portal web page of a forum should be a search box or search function. Search boxes are a convenient way for a member to quickly and methodically search through a forum’s posts and topics that they used by searching with keywords of a topics or category that interests them. An advanced search web page should also be available and linked to from the portal web page, to enable the member or user to search using more advance metrics in keyword searching through the forum’s categories, topics, and posts.
Another feature Owners of a personal or professional forum should have on a functioning portal web page of a forum should be a forum statistics box with a link to a more thorough full statistics web page. The forum statistics menu panel should at the very least, list the total amount of members currently registered on the forum, the latest member to register, the total number of forum threads/topics, and the total number of forum posts. Another metric to add to the forum statistics box could be the total number of forum polls that have been created by the forum member community.
Another feature Owners of a personal or professional forum should have on a functioning portal web page of a forum should be a latest threads box which show ten of the latest threads, topics, or posts that the forum community members have created in the forum categories.
One of the best features that Owners of a personal or professional forum should have on a functioning portal web page of a forum should be a main rss (Rich Site Summary / Really Simple Syndication) or Atom 1.0 feed that displays the latest forum posts or topics along with either a partial character of the article or post the full article on the portal web page. No more than ten forum articles should be posted to the portal web page otherwise the portal web page of the forum could get extremely long and not very methodical in scrolling a considerable amount down the web page of the portal.
Discussion Topic: Methods of PORTAL Functionality in Forums
