MyBB Community Forums

I am actively considering MyBB software for a ministry to the most unministered demographic today -- single young adults.

Needed is a front page, similar to what you see at www.southbendforum.com, for example.  Instead of using the front page for advertizing, it is needed to 1) provide a simple horizontal navigation bar with no more than seven tabs (including "Home", "Forum", "Register", "User Control Panel", "FAQ", and "Members List") and 2) briefly answer the question "Why ?" . . . similar to the "mission statement" of a typical company.

Having never developed a website, I do not know how this can be done.  Does MyBB offer a plug-in or some other device to enable formatting such a front page ?

Also, does MyBB offer the option of requiring registration before anyone can enter the forum ?

Thank you in advance for any help.

at present, there is no plugin to make a home page but required page can be made manually.
or MyBB has a portal page (eg. this forum's portal) & it can be modified to display required content

MyBB has an option to force login to display forum content. i.e. registration & login can be made compulsory to view content.

Modifying the MyBB portal might present a great option since I am not literate in HTML language.

How flexible would this be ? For example, if I wanted the "Home" or front page to present the "Why ?" of my forum, instead of immediately showing forum (as the MyBB portal is formatted), could my forum be one of the options (tabs) offered on the top, horizontal navigation bar on the home page ?

How can the MyBB be transferred to my hosting, to allow for the modifying you mention ?

Is the MyBB homepage which I would use for modification version 1.8 or 2.0 ?

So sorry for sooooo many questions.

Thank you very much for your guidance.

Yes it could be. One thing I've seen as a common solution is to have your portal display a private forum, in which users cannot access on the front page but have access to read. Then you can have static content display to users that they cannot comment on, and it doesn't appear on the forum list.

As for learning to edit the themes, I highly recommend installing XAMPP locally and playing around with templates and editing. Eventually once you become able, Xthreads would be the natural successor.

Thank you .m. and Lo. -- very helpful.

Do I need 2 domain addresses (i.e., websites) ?

The article .m. linked me to suggested that in the menu of my portal page (will likely use WordPress since I lack webpage development software), I "point" the FORUM tab to my MyBB forum address.

So I would have one domain address for my portal, and point the Forum tab on its homepage horizonal navigation bar to the MyBB domain address.

So I need to establish 2 domain addresses ?

Nope, you can rename the portal to index, and the index to forums or something like that. Ht.Access could do it too, and probably other ways I can't think of. Perhaps search about for Portal as index and see what comes up.