Appearance Manager -- 'Regeneration' tab

The Regeneration tab of the Appearance Manager allows you to regenerate all content pages (the topics page and all pages containing threads and messages) from their templates. When you regenerate your board, the program reads the data from those pages, and then rewrites the data using whatever templates, skins, and options you currently have selected.

To regenerate, choose which topic you wish to regenerate (or leave the default of "All Topics" selected) and click the "Regenerate Board" button. This procedure may take a long time, depending on the size of your board. A progress gauge will be displayed during the regeneration.

When to regenerate

You may wish to regenerate your board:

• To build all of your pages from a different skin, right after you choose that new skin through Appearance Manager or you've edited your existing skin.

• To apply changes to a color scheme you've recently made.

• To fix subtopic lists immediately after doing a data recovery operation.

It is recommended that you put your board into Maintenance Mode (through Options Manager) before regenerating, to prevent posting and other activity from taking resources away from the regeneration procedure.

Regeneration is generally a safe operation -- it does not cause data loss (except in the case when a board skin is corrupted making the program unable to read basic information from the pages generated from that skin).

Changing a URL

When regenerating, you can have Discus do a search-and-replace to find any instances of a particular URL and replace them with the HTML URL for your current board (discus.conf html_url setting). This should be used with extreme care, as doing this improperly can result in breaking clipart images, as well as uploaded images and attachments, throughout your entire board interface.

To regenerate a board and change the URL:

1. Go to the Appearance Manager and the Regeneration tab.

2. Check the "Change URL from" box.

3. Into the text entry box next to "Change URL from" type in the HTML URL of your old Discus board (this should be the html_url setting from your OLD discus.conf file).

4. Click the button to regenerate the board.

The URL that is entered must be exactly equal to the html_url setting from the previous discus.conf file used for this board. Generally this will be of the form http://your.old.server.com/discus. Using anything else risks the search-and-replace not doing anything at all, or the regeneration with that setting damaging your board.