Popular SMF modifications
Simple machines forum (SMF) is one of popular free forum software available to create/handle a community forum. It is my favorite free forum software. In a previous hub I explained How to install Simple Machines Forum software in your web server. Here I explain some of important, popular modifications which we can use to customize your SMF forum. For simplicity we abbreviate modification as mod. We can enhance the performance our forum, we add extra features to our forum using mods. So let me explain some of popular SMF mods in this hub.
Ad management Mod
This is one of popular SMF mod which can manage displaying advertisements in your SMF forum. Once you install this mod you can easily add ads, remove ads and edit ads. Also you can specify a position to add your ads. You can either put your ads in bottom of each page, top of the each page, below the each topic and so on. These settings can be handled using ad management settings via administration center. You only need the HTML or PHP code of the advertisement. In this manner, using ad management mod you can monetize your forum easily .
Referrals System Mod
You know, you like to have a very large forum with lot of number of members. So you need to have a referral system to bring more new members to your forum via existing members. It is one of very successive way to attract more members to your community forum. So you can have a referral system in your SMF forum by installing Referrals System mod. Members of your SMF forum can easily invite to your forum just by sending their referral link to friends. We can enable display the number of referrals each member referred to your forum in their pots display, track the hits for referral link hits and number of days to store the tracking cookie for referrals via referrals system settings in the administration center.
Simple Audio Video Embedder Mod
This SMF mod is an auto embed media modification for SMF that takes links for major video websites and adds a player directly into the post in your forum. Therefore members of your forum do not need to go to the particular video web site. They can easily watch the video in the particular post. So you can keep your members in the forum. This mod supports popular web sites such as youtube, dailymotion, tinypic, yahoo, imageshack, Google video, facebook, myspace etc.
Social Media Icons Mod
Social media icons mod is adding public topics to different social bookmarks. Your members can bookmark their favorite topics in your forum easily with this mod. This mod supports popular social networks such as facebook, Google+, twitter, digg etc.
Here I just explained very few amount of popular SMF modifications that I have experienced. But there are lot of popular modifications available in the SMF mods site which I haven’t experienced. So you can try them too. I will add my experience here once I experienced other SMF mods.
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