Better Portal - About

[admin]

Better Portal is a flexible portal and page-builder system for SMF 2.1.x designed to make building a custom front page simple instead of frustrating.
A lot of portal systems are powerful, but they can also be confusing to configure. Better Portal was built around the opposite idea: give forum owners useful building blocks, clear controls, and enough flexibility to create a professional layout without having to fight the interface.
You can create multiple portal pages, choose which one acts as your home page, control column layouts and widths, and arrange content using draggable rows and blocks. Preset blocks make it easy to add useful forum content such as latest posts, who's online, forum statistics, polls, downloads, gallery content, chat, reactions, and more.
Better Portal also integrates directly with other Better SMF mods. If Better Gallery, Better Chat, Better Downloads, Better Reactions & Likes, or other supported Better mods are installed, Portal can expose dedicated blocks for them automatically.
One of the biggest features is Forum Mode, which allows the forum itself to live inside a portal page. Boards, topics, posting, replies, downloads, gallery content, and other interactive features can all remain inside the portal experience instead of constantly sending users to separate sections of the site.
Better Portal was designed to work well on desktop and mobile, with responsive layouts that can stack naturally on smaller screens.
Main features include
- Multiple portal pages
- Selectable home page
- One, two, and three-column layouts
- Adjustable column widths
- Drag-and-drop rows and blocks
- Custom content blocks
- Preset SMF content blocks
- Latest forum posts
- Who's online
- Forum statistics
- Polls
- Full forum-in-a-block support
- Better Gallery integration
- Better Chat integration
- Better Downloads integration
- Better Reactions & Likes integration
- Mobile-friendly layouts
- Portal-based forum navigation
- Extensible block registry for future mods
Better Portal is built to give SMF site owners a powerful portal without turning site management into a project of its own.
Simple to build. Easy to understand. Flexible enough to grow with your forum.