Appearance Manager -- 'Interface' tab

The Interface tab of the appearance manager allows the board administrator to choose two very important settings for the operation of the discussion board. For most installations, the default settings will be appropriate and acceptable. In other words, unless you know what you're doing and you have a good reason to change the settings, you can leave them as they are.

Topics Page

There are two ways that Discus can generate the board topics page (which shows all topics that exist on the board and is generally the first page that a visitor accesses).

All previous versions of Discus have generated the board topics page as a static HTML file. This means that the board topics page is just an ordinary, HTML file that resides on your server. This has the advantage of being extremely fast when called by a visitor, since your Web server is optimized to serve HTML files and this does not require Perl scripts.

Discus Pro 4.0 adds a new feature whereby your visitors are shown only those topics that they are authorized to read. In other words, if you have private, read restricted topics, in the user has not yet login, they do not see those restricted topics. It is not possible to generate a static HTML board topics page that hides topics based on a user's login status. For this option to work, the board topics page must be generated using a Perl script.

In the "Have users retrieve topics page from" box, select Static HTML File to have the topics page retrieved from a static HTML file, and select Template/Skin to have the topics page generated dynamically.

Frames

All skins distributed by DiscusWare have the capability built in the function in either a frame or a no frames environment. You can select whether or not your board will appear in a frame set or without frames by choosing an option from this section. Next to "Show User Interface with," choose No Frames to view your board in a single frame set with a menu of commonly accessed utilities displayed somewhere within that single frame. Choose Frames to view your discussion board in two frames: a left frame which contains a main menu of commonly accessed utilities, and a right frame which contains the messages and discussion board pages.

Well-written skins will have frame vs. no frame capability built into them. If you change the setting of frames vs. no frames in your Appearance Manager and you lose navigation icons within the user interface, the skin that you have selected has not been properly designed for a framed vs. no frames switchover.