I'm sure we've all seen it before. The incompetent webmaster (or, in this case, admin) who simply refuses to use the wonderful art of subforums, and instead dump every single forum on the main page, so that your scroll bar shrinks to the size of your mouse pointer. Very ugly indeed.
Anyway, this topic is going to demonstrate better ways of laying out content so that it is still easily accessible, you can still use subforums, but you have a main page that's....well...readable.
The steps I go through may seem exceedingly obvious to some, but if you do think they are "too basic", ask yourself, "Have I followed them? Or have I done exactly what this is avoiding?"
Anyway, on with the tutorial. Basically, today we're going to take some of our forums off the main page, but still have them easily accessible by all. To do this, we follow these steps;
1. Decide which category you want to take off the main page. For example, if you are running an RPG board, you can remove all the non RPG forums from the main page. There's an example on my
userpage (click the website link).
2. Right click the category's title and select "Copy Link Location" (Firefox) or "Copy Shortcut" (IE).
3. In Admin CP, go MANAGE FORUMS -> NEW FORUM. The Forum's name should be whatever the name of the category was (to avoid confusion) and the description should be long and precise. Under REDIRECTS (still on the same page), choose "Turn URL Redirection ON", and insert the URL you just copied. If you want to make it look fancy, insert a number other then 0 in "Redirect Clicks to Date". Give all groups read permissions (except Banned and Guests if you don't want them looking around too much). Reply/Start/Upload permissions do nothing.
4. Find the category we just created a redirect too. Set its state to "Hidden". DO NOT set it to "Disable". If you do so, once a member enters it (by clicking your redirect) and enters a forum inside it, they can't go back out to the category without going to the board home first, and clicking the redirect again.
5
Optional. The problem with doing this is that the forums inside the category no longer display last post info on the main page (because they don't show up). Also (and more painful in my opinion), you can't SEE links to each of the forums inside from the main page. But this can be solved! Go into your redirect forum's settings, and in the section where you give the forum's description, simply insert links to each forum inside. For a fancier way of doing it, copy this template it: