Florian Amrhein

NewsPortal Layout Guide

Colors

   To change the colors of NewsPortal simply edit the style.css. It
   should be self explaining.

only topics in thread.php

   Normaly, newsportal always displays complete threads in thread.php. An
   alternative view you can suppress this by setting setting
   $thread_show["replies"] to false in the thread layout section in
   config.inc.php.
   It makes sense to set $thread_show["threadsize"] to true, so that your
   visitors can see how many articles are in a thread without clicking on
   it. It would also good, that they see the date of the most recent
   article in the thread instead of the first, so set
   $thread_show["lastdate"] to true.

flat view for articles

   If you show only the topics in your thread.php, as described above,
   you maybe want to activate the flat-view for your articles.
   Normaly, your article.php only shows one single article plus (if not
   deactivated by setting article_showthread to false) links to the other
   articles in the thread.
   This behaviour can be changed by using an alternative code for
   displaying articles. Set $file_article to "article-flat.php". Now, all
   articles of a thread are shown on one single page (that can be
   splittet, what we see later) one after another.
   This style is typical for webboards. If you want to show real
   newsgroups, this will make problems, because users of webboards often
   add additions to the thread by simply replying to the last article,
   what will make problems, if their answer don't match to this last
   article.
   But this flat-view make sense, if you have an isolated system, and
   only want to use a newsserver as backend without using the typical
   layout and handling of newsgroups.
   Now, there are some additionaly settings, you may want to use:
     * $articleflat_articles_per_page defines, how many articles should
       be displayed on a single page
     * Long articles can be cut to the first
       $articleflat_chars_per_articles. If a article gets cut, there will
       be a link where your visitors can view the complete article. If
       you have set $file_article_full to the original article.php, then
       they will see the normal view to a single article.
