To create a new forum topic go into 'create content' on the left hand side bar on the home page, then click on forum topics. Its pretty straight forward from there as regards the subject and the language options*. The forum topics are limited, but if you wanted to add another category eg copyright, then you would click onto content management on the black bar at the top of the home page, click categories, then click add term on the forums. This gives a few options such as the parent category, which you may want to put under the term 'site building' for example.
Back to creating a forum topic. if you look at menu settings, here you can link the forum to other topics. Therefore for example if you want to link your forum into the taxi to praxi main menu, you select the parent category as Taxi to Praxi from the list and your forum topic will become a child of that parent. Another setting is the publishing options; if you want your post to go to the front page, you tick the box under that says 'promote to front page'. To add a comment to an existing forum, just click 'add comment' at the bottom of the main forum posting.
It is very easy to add a language. Once you have signed in go to the black bar at the top of the home page. Select 'site configuration' then 'localisation'. you will then see 'manage languages'. Click on 'add language' then you will see a drop down list of languages. After you have added a language go back to 'manage languages' then click 'enable'.
To add the language to the menu category (the choice list you see when you go into create content), simply go to 'content management' on the black bar at the top of the home page and click 'categories'. You will then see the list for languages where you can add a term.
“A while ago i created a new image gallery by doing the same thing in image galleries (ie site configuration ect) but I forgot to link it to the main image menu that appears on the right hand navigation bar on the home page. Today I linked it into that main menu so that it appears in the gallery list. To do this I went to the black navigation bar at the top, clicked on 'site building' then 'menus'. I then went to 'add menu item'. In here it asked for the title, which in my case was 'Electronica' as that was the gallery that I'd created. It then asked for the path. This is the URL that the menu wants to link to and was the address for 'electronica'. To find this I had to click on the gallery and copy the address from the bar which was http://www.thenextlayer.org/image/tid/275 It then asks for a parent, and in this case the parent menu item I wanted to link to was 'image galleries' which could be found in the drop down list.”