Tutorial - Using the Text Editor for posting

Our forum has a pretty sophisticated posting editor compared to other forum software and group offerings.  There are a number of features you'll find here that you may not have seen other places, such as the detection and auto-embedding of youtube videos just by pasting a link to the video in questions.

Basic Features:


The editor features standard text formating functions, such as font style and alignment, as well as an undo button; these are accessible from the left-hand section of the toolbar. 

• Bold, Italics, and Underline
• A font selector
• Left and Center paragraph alignments
• A bulleted list
• An 'undo' button

Advanced Features:

The right side has some more advanced features:

• www link : this will link a word or phrase to a url.
  
• Insert image:  Adds an image from a url to your post.  Paste the URL to the image in the box and click on the green button.  Certain web browsers will let you resize the image by dragging the corners.
  
• Embed Flash (and videos): Paste your video or flash embed code in the box, click the button and a placeholder image will appear in your editor. You can move this placeholder around and even resize it if your browser allows.  When you submit your post the video or flash object will replace the image, at whatever position and size you set it.
  
• Emoticons: Just click an emoticon in the panel that appears to add it to your post.  We'll be expanding the emoticon library sometime in February or March of '09.

Automatic Functions:

• Auto Hyperlinking: If the editor finds a url like http://www.example.com it will automatically make it a clickable link.
  
• Auto Image Detection: If the editor finds a url of an image it will automatically display that image in the post where the url originally was. An option to disable this will be displayed at the bottom of the editor when it detects such a link.
• Auto Youtube Video Detection: If the editor finds the url of a youtube video it will display the video in the post the same way as for images, similarly an option will be presented to disable the function. If you have the full flash embed code, use the '<> Embed Flash' button.
  

File Uploads & Attachments:
You can upload images, videos, music, documents, zip files, ... - anything you want to your post. Uploaded photos will automatically be displayed at the bottom of the post.  Other file types may just be listed as an 'attachment' on the post and prompt the user to download the attachment when they click on it.  Your forum has over 4GB of storage space completely for free, individual files are limited to 20MB each.