As to the first issue, that's just a warning. It should work fine as is. But I'll address it for the next release.

As to the second issue, that seems to have nothing to do with JForum - which doesn't use JAX-RS or Jersey. Is that something you added to the web app? If so, it apparently needs whatever library javax.cache.configuration.Configuration is in.

Is the war being extracted to a directory? Or is the app run directly form the war file? If the latter, that may lead to various issues. If possible, try having the war file exploded to a real directory.

As to changing the look, it depends on how far you want to go. https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/main/resources/templates/default/styles/style.css has a lot of the colors and fonts and such.

As to moving things around, that would concern the template files. An easy start into that might be the templates for the mobile-optimized pages in https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/main/resources/templates/default/mobile/ as those are a lot simpler than the templates for the desktop look. (Note that the mobile look also has its own CSS definitions.)

Sorry for the late reply, I'm just noticing this. The first URL is the correct one as it points to the trunk rather than one of the branches.

JForum2 being open source, you're free to use it according to its license (which is the BSD license). That certainly includes the right to change its look according to your preferences.

Sorry, no idea. I've never run Jetty as a service or daemon.

Well, as I said, the new version fixes this - there was indeed a bug in JForum.

JForum 2.6.2 has been released, which addresses two issues:

It installs and runs on the HSQLDB database.

Fixes a bug that prevents the popup window showing all smilies to be shown when writing a post.

It also includes these two fixes which had been addressed in JForum 2.6.1:

It installs and runs on the Jetty servlet container.

It fixes a bug where deleting posts would cause the corresponding entry in the Moderation Log to be illegible, and break the page layout.

All users can safely upgrade, but if you aren't using Jetty or HsqlDB, or haven't run into one of the bugs, it may not be worth the effort.

I've just released version 2.6.2 which restores compatibility with HSQLDB.

I think either PostgreSQL and MySQL would be good choices as the DB - they're free, and the best tested (as you have just found out).

I'll try to reproduce that. But looking at the volume of data on java-gaming.org, I think using HSQLDB (an embedded DB with a simplistic file storage approach) would not be a good choice.

Update: It happens for me as well. By the way, the full stack trace of the exception is in the HTML source code of that page, as the message suggests. Not that that will help someone unfamiliar with the code base, but it helps me

I was wondering, though: is there a place where we specify the subdirectory for the html? Or do we just make use of /templates/default? It seems like there would be a place to specify a file folder name other than "default" but I am not seeing it.

That is the place to make changes. Way back when there was the idea to allow different themes in order to be able to customize the look and feel without having to change the default templates, but that feel by the wayside a long time ago. The "default" directory hierarchy is a remnant of that.

Let us know if you hit any JForum-specific issues and we may be able to help.

How are you making out? I'm curious to see if we can persuade you and your community to switch to JForum2

We've released version 2.6.1 recently, which addresses the Jetty issue, and also fixes a bug that messed up the moderation log.

JForum 2.6.1 has been released, which addresses two issues:

It installs and runs on the Jetty servlet container.

It fixes a bug where deleting posts would cause the corresponding entry in the Moderation Log to be illegible, and break the page layout.

All users can safely upgrade, but if you aren't using Jetty, or haven't run into the moderation log issue, it may not be worth the effort.

It occurs to me, the problem could have been something really simple, like having made a too-clever-by-half password for my root user.
It included chars "*" and ")" as well as numbers and caps.

That is an interesting thought. I don't think that would cause problems, but I'll check to make sure.

Both driver versions are fine; see https://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-j/8.0/en/connector-j-versions.html. Version 5.1 is shipped with JForum, so nothing needs to be installed. We'll switch to 8.x for the next JForum release, given that Java 8 is required anyway now.