Often, gears rely on the portal page templates and the PAF to provide gear mode changes. For example, a portal page typically renders a gear with a border, which is controlled by the gear title template rather than by the gear itself. Within the border there is often an Edit link used to change the gear mode from content to userConfig.
You may need to use a link to make changes to the internal state of a gear, rather than changes to a gear’s mode or display mode. This kind of change is not directly supported by PAF-defined parameters and must be handled internally by the gear. For example, a discussion forum gear might need to have such parameters as forumID, topicID, startRange, action (thread_list, topic_list, etc.).
