What do I need before signing up?

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1

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

2

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.

3

Salut @gina_riley

Je rejoins l’avis de @tophee – la meilleure façon de bien organiser les choses est de s’inscrire à un essai et de tester un peu.

Réponses précises à tes questions :

  1. Non. Si tu pars de zéro, il n’y aura rien à migrer. Tu démarrerais avec une instance Discourse toute fraîche et tu construiras ta communauté de A à Z. Tu peux poser tes questions et obtenir de l’aide à ce sujet dans notre catégorie Community Building.

  2. Non. Une fois ton essai configuré, tu peux organiser tes catégories toi-même. Il est toujours préférable de commencer petit et de développer au fur et à mesure de tes besoins. Commence avec le strict minimum de catégories (support/général/une ou deux catégories liées à un sujet) et ajoute-en au fur et à mesure que tu identifies tes besoins.

  3. Ce sont des thèmes. Tu peux changer ton thème ici – consulte le menu hamburger

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Cela dit, il existe de nombreuses façons de personnaliser Discourse. Je te suggère de mettre ton essai en place, puis nous pourrons t’aider pour les prochaines étapes.

4

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.

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Ah yes – what he said. ^^

Thanks for the catch.

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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?

7

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

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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.

9

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