Thanks for the answer.
Changing the mongodb params came from earlier posts on the forum
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/10810/connection-to-mongodb-that-is-hosted-on-atlas/6
I take that I could as well include them directly in the config.sjon as parameters to the uri query.
Yes, I did spend hours on googling this and similar error messages.
No, you can't create any collection manually on admin on MongoDb Atlas.
Neither from CLI nor from web interface.
Have upgraded from M0 to M2 just to see if there would be any impact but it isn't.
The most interesting thing is that the collection socket.io on admin was not created on local instance in order to get the nodebb to run. I am able to create it locally but setup did not create it.
You would need to edit the theme, to change the widget areas and sizes. The current widget system isn't advanced enough to do that alone. Also, the widgets currently reload every page change, which will look strange if widget content doesn't. But overall, it would work.
I would ditch the widgets and use a theme with that as the main layout. Then if you need to change the side bar, you can use some simple js to change it when a particular page is loading. Of course, this would not work if you are planning to use a lot of the existing widgets.
