What do I need before signing up?

A few questions, thank you in advance.

(1) Before I sign up for discourse hosting, do I need to have a forum already for migration?

(2) I have a great idea of the setup of a discourse so that being said, I am guessing that I need to have the categories already written and ready to go for the hosting party to download or implement?

(3) I noticed some of the discourse forums have really cool background pictures like “Gems of War” & some have a black background, that I really like. If I want to add picture background, what dimension should I get it in?

Note: I am starting from scratch.

Thanks again, Gina

You could start with a 14 day free trial:

No, you don’t need that. You enter them once you log in as an admin.

BTW: it is better to start off with just a few categories anyway and add nee ones based on how the community evolves.

Hola @gina_riley

Me sumo a la sugerencia de @tophee: la mejor forma de organizar las cosas es registrarse para una prueba gratuita y experimentar un poco.

Respuestas específicas a tus preguntas:

  1. No. Si estás empezando desde cero, no habrá nada que migrar. Comenzarás con una instancia nueva de Discourse y construirás tu comunidad desde cero. Puedes hacer preguntas y obtener soporte para eso en nuestra categoría Community Building.

  2. No. Una vez que tengas configurada tu prueba, puedes organizar tus categorías como quieras. Es mejor empezar con poco y crecer según sea necesario. Mantén el número mínimo de categorías (soporte/general/una o dos categorías relacionadas con el tema) y añade más a medida que veas cuáles son los requisitos.

  3. Esos son temas. Puedes cambiar tu tema aquí: consulta el menú de hamburguesa

Dicho esto, hay muchas formas de personalizar Discourse. Te sugiero que pongas en marcha tu prueba y luego podemos ayudarte con los siguientes pasos.

I believe that hamburger theme thing is custom here on meta as a demo, so it is better to change user theme in your user preferences in the usual place which will work in all cases.

Ah yes – what he said. ^^

Thanks for the catch.

The “Gems of War” wallpaper is excellent. I’m assuming the “Gems of War” guys customized their code and did not use discourse administration settings.

I have launched discourse for the community of Montgomery, Alabama and the Chamber of Commerce will announce launch. The unused Medium platform has the image for the discourse platform: Montgomery Medium platform

Any suggestions before I begin to inspect “Gems of War” css?

Hey Josh,
This is a good starting point if you want to create complicated themes: Developing Discourse Themes & Theme Components

Very informative @HAWK.
Thanks for the post.

I’ll probably hire a freelancer due to time constraints. Does the Discourse team have in house experts who provide custom theme services?
I want the city’s discourse forum to really attract the end user’s attention with local images.

Hey Josh, not inhouse, no. We can recommend @joebuhlig from Procourse though. He is excellent.