Jenna,

The forum can only fit into the size the WP theme allows. In your case that theme has a set width of 850px. Then it adds some margins that make the content even smaller.

If you are happy with that WP theme on the rest of the site then I would suggest that you look into the CSS for the forum page and make changes as needed.

If you are not familiar with CSS or not sure how to make the changes you may need to find a programmer that can do the changes for you.

like Brandon says, we can only use the space given to us by the wp theme…  try editing the wp page the forum is on and see if you can change the page template to a full width version instead of the default one…

Thanks to you both for the responses.  I’m not attached to the OP theme (as far as building my forums goes), actually I was just trying out different ones to see which gave me the most width.  Then I started looking at others’ forums and have noticed theirs seem to be about the same size. Is there any particular theme you can recommend that would automatically give me a larger page width?

Thanks,

Jenna

Oh goodness – I really wouldn’t like to say! Most themes I have come across usually have a full-width page template that you can assign the forum page to use which is the best solution. I would have thought this would be more common than not to be honest but could be wrong. Most users whose site we get to see usually have a nice wide template they can use.

Thanks, Yellow Swordfish. And where in WP settings would I find that setting to use the full-page template for a particular theme?

Well – some themes do their own thing and add a panel to the WP Page – Add/Edit screen where you can choose from templates. But the default WP method is to display them in a drop down list under templates. So go to pages – list the pages and select the page the forum uses and edit it – look for the options to select a template.

If your theme supports more than one template option it will be there somewhere.

Be aware that the default WP themes DO have a full width template option but they do NOT display full-width. For some bizarre reason the Wp team seem to think that for full page width you just shoe an empty sidebar! We do not understand why they think this is adequate

Thanks so much for the info – much appreciated.  I guess I’ll just keep tooling around with them until I find one that comes closest to what I’m looking for.

my themes of choices when I develop sites is the Genesis framework…

Thanks Mr Papa.  It seems I’ve heard mention of Genesis a few times while reading through the support forum. I may have to check it out

just my favorite   but not free either…

but truth is, most themes these days do provide a full width template…