Embeded forum Guide!
How do I embed a forum into my officelive website?
This page is made to help all officelive users embed a forum into their website. After I had made a help forum on my website, I started receiving help questions on how did I embed a forum? I think we all might be aware that Microsoft officelive doesn't provide a forum template for their website owners. So with that said, everyone thinks it can't be done.
Well, I got good news for you: You can embed or insert a forum to your officelive website. I did have to sign up for a free forum at another company and then use the forum code that they provided to embed it into my website. It wasn't as simple as it sounds though.... because the code isn't able to work correctly with out a iframe.With alot of trial and error, I was able to accomplish the help forum placement. All of you Microsoft officelive users are now in luck because I am going to tell you step by step how to embed a forum to your website. Just be patient and follow the step by step guide below! If you have problems and need help, you can contact me or post your question in our help forum!
Step by Step instructions on embedding a forum to your officelive website!
| Step 1 | Sign up for a free forum through the free web tools link below:
During your signup you will have a choice on what type of forum you want. You need to choose the embeded forum choice. If not you will have just a link to your forum and it will not look like it is your website forum. Your viewers will have to click away from your website. You want the forum to be a part of your website. |
| Step 2 | After you signup for your free forum, you need to design the forum in the left panel via bravenet, where your free forum is at. You then need to get the html code for your forum. You can do this via bravenet at the top right corner of your forum page. The page where you designed and set up your forum. There should be a "get code" button at the top! |
| Step 3 | After you have copied the forum code, you now need to open your notepad on your computer and paste and save your forum code to your notepad! Save your code as forum.htm or something you are able to remember. It does have to be a .htm file though. If not you may have troubles later. |
| Step 4 | You are now ready to login to officelive to upload the forum code to your document gallery. So login and go to design site, then you hit your document gallery option which is on the left side of your page manager. Now upload your forum.htm code by hitting browse and choosing the document that you want to upload (forum.htm). |
| Step 5 | Okay are you still with me? Is your forum.htm document uploaded to your document gallery? If so you are ready to go to your forum page on your website (new page if you haven't created it yet). Or the page where you want your forum to be. You are now going to click on where you would like your forum to be. Click the html insert module in your page editor and insert the iframe code that I give you in step 6! Don't close the html box yet....You will need to insert and change the code a little bit. |
| Step 6 | <iframe SRC="/Documents/code.txt" width="200px" height="90px"
frameborder="0" marginwidth="0px" marginheight="0px" scrolling="no" </iframe> |
| Step 7 | Now delete code.txt from the iframe code in step 6 and replace it with your forum code that you uploaded. (forum.htm). You also need to change the width from 200 to whatever size you want your forum's width to be. Only delete the 200 and and replace it with example: 520 and then do the same with the height size. Replace the 90 with the height that you want your forum page to be. |
Whew....You should now be done!...Please keep in mind that you will probably not see your forum right away or you may never see it when you are editing your forum page in officelive. You need to make sure you save what you have done and then go view your website. You may have to log out of officelive to view your forum. All of the changes to your forum should be done via the company that hosts your forum.
If you still are unable to see your forum....Don't freak out! I am aware of all the trouble that you just went through and I am here to help you. Please make sure you followed every step and understood every step. Every step in the guide above is very important. So if you don't like a step, you can't just skip it. I advise you to read the embeded forum guide a couple times. You may also print this page so that you can follow it as you are working on it.