Heretic121
OMG Member
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2010
- Messages
- 446
This is a simple little guide to XenForo Nodes. A Node is one of four things. It can be a category, a forum, a linkforum or a page.
A Category is a what you would use for a group of forums, linkforums or pages. So in the image above "Official Forums" is the Category. You can also create Categories inside of Categories.
A Forum is where you do all your posting. There can also be forums inside forums (sub-forums), amongst other things. In the image above "Announcements" and "Have You Seen...?" are Forums.
A LinkForum is a link to a URL, which you set when you're creating it. In the image above "Random Questions Answered" is a LinkForum.
A Page is a HTML document which is displayed in Categories, or under forums. There are quite a few things you can with Page nodes, but some options include: Logging and counting visits to the page, listing sibling and child nodes. You can also use PHP Callbacks so you can use PHP to load the page node. If you was to use the PHP Callback you could even make a CMS type thing.
For all four types of Node you can hide them from the public Node Tree (Node Tree is the structure of your forum) but you can still access the Node if you know the URL to it. So you could create a Node, hide it from users and then add a LinkForum Node which links to the Node. You also have the ability to show sibling, and child, nodes when creating a Page which could be used to create documentation. If you was to do that you could have different groups of users that could only see a certain group of documentation but still have all of the documentation under the same Page node.
Honestly there are so many options you have when it comes to the layout of forum. You'll have to try them all out for yourself, and have fun doing so!
Thanks for reading, as always if you have any questions I invite you to ask them and I'll do my best to reply to them to the best of my knowledge.
A Category is a what you would use for a group of forums, linkforums or pages. So in the image above "Official Forums" is the Category. You can also create Categories inside of Categories.
A Forum is where you do all your posting. There can also be forums inside forums (sub-forums), amongst other things. In the image above "Announcements" and "Have You Seen...?" are Forums.
A LinkForum is a link to a URL, which you set when you're creating it. In the image above "Random Questions Answered" is a LinkForum.
A Page is a HTML document which is displayed in Categories, or under forums. There are quite a few things you can with Page nodes, but some options include: Logging and counting visits to the page, listing sibling and child nodes. You can also use PHP Callbacks so you can use PHP to load the page node. If you was to use the PHP Callback you could even make a CMS type thing.
For all four types of Node you can hide them from the public Node Tree (Node Tree is the structure of your forum) but you can still access the Node if you know the URL to it. So you could create a Node, hide it from users and then add a LinkForum Node which links to the Node. You also have the ability to show sibling, and child, nodes when creating a Page which could be used to create documentation. If you was to do that you could have different groups of users that could only see a certain group of documentation but still have all of the documentation under the same Page node.
Honestly there are so many options you have when it comes to the layout of forum. You'll have to try them all out for yourself, and have fun doing so!
Thanks for reading, as always if you have any questions I invite you to ask them and I'll do my best to reply to them to the best of my knowledge.
