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.

Привет, @gina_riley

Поддерживаю предложение @tophee — лучший способ разобраться во всём — оформить пробную версию и поэкспериментировать.

Конкретные ответы на ваши вопросы:

  1. Нет. Если вы начинаете с нуля, переносить нечего. Вы начнёте с чистой установки Discourse и будете строить своё сообщество с нуля. Задать вопросы и получить поддержку по этому поводу можно в категории Community Building на нашем форуме.

  2. Нет. После настройки пробной версии вы сами сможете организовать категории. Лучше начать с малого и расширять структуру по мере необходимости. Оставьте минимально необходимое количество категорий (поддержка/общее/одна-две категории по темам) и добавляйте новые по мере выявления требований.

  3. Это темы оформления. Вы можете изменить тему здесь — откройте меню-гамбургер.

Кстати, Discourse можно настраивать множеством способов. Я бы рекомендовал сначала запустить пробную версию, а затем мы поможем вам с дальнейшими шагами.

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.