270 CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES As
270 CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES As the administrator, you can use the Smilies (phpBB uses the terms emoticons and smilies interchangeably) option in the Administration panel to add or remove smiley codes at your leisure. To add a code for an emoticon, click the Add a new Smiley button at the bottom of the form. You will be prompted for the code, the smiley image file (which must reside in images/ smilies), and a description of what the emotion expresses. Click Submit, and the code will be added. Alternatively, you can add more emoticons en masse by installing Smile Packs, which come complete with the necessary codes, descriptions, and images. All you need to do is unzip the Smile Pack file you wish to import into the images/smiles directory under your phpBB root. Then go to the Smilies panel, click Import Smiley Pack at the bottom of the form, and select the pack from the drop-down menu. You can choose to overwrite your existing set of emoticons, and choose to resolve conflicts by replacing or keeping existing emoticons. After you click Import Smileys, phpBB will automatically add all the codes in the pack to the board, and they will be available for use immediately. If you would like to release your installed emoticons as an installable Smile Pack, you can use the Export Smile Pack option to make it so. phpBB generates a smiles.pak file, which you rename to whatever you like, keeping the .pak extension. Then you create a zip file with your emoticon images and the .pak file, and release it at will. Making Topics Sticky and Posting Announcements Users with the proper permissions in a forum have the option when creating a new topic to make it normal, sticky, or an announcement, as shown at the bottom of Figure 9-2. Sticky and announcement topics are denoted with special icons, and are stuck (hence the term sticky) at the top of each forum. Announcements in multipage forums appear at the top of each page in the forum. Sticky topics appear only at the top of the first page. Figure 9-2. The options for setting a sticky or announcement post are highlighted.
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