wpForo like all other professional forum softwares provides with an ability to create unlimited categories and forums in boards (by default there is one board). There are two different types of forums: Categories and Forums.
Categories
- Categories are the top level parent forums, which are designed to group similar forums in a separate section on the forum home page.
- They are only designed for forum grouping purpose, there is no way to add topics in categories, and they don’t contain topics. The topics are created in the forums under the categories.
- In Dashboard > wpForo > Forums admin page, if a category (blue panels) doesn’t have forums (gray panels) it will not be displayed on front-end. Each category should contain at least one forum to be displayed on the forum home page.
- wpForo forums can be displayed with different layouts (Extended, Simplified, Q&A and Threaded). Forums inherit the layout from their parent category. Thus, if you need to change some forum layout, you should change its top parent Category layout. In other words, forums’ layout depends on the top category (blue panels) layout. They cannot have a different layout.
Forums and Subforums
Forums are used to classify discussion topics. For every topic that you create, you create it in some forum. The purpose of forums is to enable forum administrators to quickly display a listing of a particular type/mean of topics. For example, if you want users to be able to quickly access all of the company’s news, you could create a forum called “Company News and Announcements”. When a user adds a news topic, they can assign it to the “Company News and announcements” forum. To find all of the available news and announcements, other users can search on the “News and Announcements” forum to see a listing of topics that are in that forum.
Forums must have a top/parent Category, they inherit Category Layout and are being grouped under this Category. Forums also have statistic data, such as number of topics, posts, last topic title, author and date.
Forums are also hierarchical, there are parent and child forums, the child forums are called “Subforums”. Subforums are displayed under their parent forum title:
