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Blogger Help Series 4 - Adding a Forum to Blogger
This fourth series on Blogger help shows you how to create a community around your blog and give readers more opportunity to contribute by adding a forum to it.
To add a forum to blogger only takes a few minutes.
I have been trying some customization tricks for Google blogger blog and I have been sharing them in the blogger help series.
The latest I tried is adding a forum to my demonstration blog. And it's quite interesting.
Depending on the topic you address on your blog, it will get to a stage where adding a forum becomes essential to build a larger community around your blog and give readers more opportunity to help and get helped.
Step by Step Process of How to Add a Forum to Blogger
Step 1
Create a static page. See part 3 of the blogger Help series of how it is done.
Do not add content to the page you create, just a title that you will want your URL to read for your forum and publish it.
Step two
Go to n3.nabble.com and create a free forum.
A page displays where you have to enter the name of your forum and it's description.
Be creative with your descriptive message. Click on the "HTML option" above the space for description to add options like bold, smileys, links, image, e.t.c. to your description.
After entering the name and the description, click on "Create Forum" and you will get the message below.
Step three : Customizing your Forum
The way the forum appears at this stage if you click on "No go to next message" then you wouldn't be able to add sub-forums or customize the forum as you want.
So click on 'Yes create sample sub-forums'. Then just below click on "Options" followed by "Structure" and click on "Create new sub-forum" (see photo below).
Once you have added the first sub-forum (category), to add another category, click on the link above that reads the name of the forum you are creating.
That is leave the page of the sub-forum you have created to the home of your forum before repeating the process. Otherwise the next category you add would appear as a sub-category under the first one you created.
Meaning if you want to create a sub-category under an already created category. Then once you have created the primary category just stay on that page and click 'create new sub-forum'.
But if you want the following forum to appear as a new primary category then you must click on the forum name link above before repeating the process.
I stress this because I wasted like an hour figuring it out myself.
All the categories I created was appearing as sub-categories under previous ones created. Until it occured to me to click the link to the home of the forum before adding a new category.
This is why I run practical tutorials so I can direct you accordingly. All the blogger help series I have ran, I have tested them out to see it works before writing about it.
To Edit the appearance of your forum, click on Editor from "Options" and click on 'Change appearance'.
You can give your forum a different look and feel that blends with your blog.
From there you can even decide whether or not you want your forum to appear in search engines.
If you want to access the forum with a custom domain (your own domain name), click on "Change domain" under Editor.
When you are done editing, click on "Embeded Options" from the home page to copy your code.
Step four : How to Embed your Forum to your Blog
Log in to your blogger dashboard, hoping you have already added more widgets (blogger help series 2) to your header, click on "Add a gadget" on the header section of your page elements, then click on HTML/Javascript.
Paste the code in the open form. Give it a title (e.g forum) and save.
Now if you view your blog, you will realize that the forum is displayed on your home page. You have to restrict the forum to display on the particular static page you have created for forum.
See part 5 of the blogger help series on how to make posts/pages display in specific pages.
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