I wanted to add forums to my community website.  I originally went with Simple Machines Forum because it worked with a Windows hosting plan.  But, then when I moved to Linux hosting, I switched to phpBB.

The additional install of phpBB was handled by the GoDaddy installer but I was able to move it to Media Temple quite easily because it was MySQL and PHP.

I started reading the phpBB documentation to figure out how to use it.  One of the first things I noticed was I needed to upgrade it.  The process wasn’t as simple as a WordPress upgrade but fairly straightforward based on the upgrade documentation.

The main part of the documentation that was critical to setting up the board was understanding permissions and groups.  Once I figured out how they are related and that who can copy the settings between forums, the configuration made sense.

There was a few other settings that I did:

  • Board Settings
    • Enter Site Name
    • Enter Site Description
    • Set the Guest timezone
  • Avatar Settings
    • Enable avatars – yes
  • Feed Settings
    • enable feeds – enabled
  • E-mail Settings
    • Set contact and return e-mail address
    • Set STMP server address
  • Server Settings
    • Domain name
  • User Registration Settings
    • Account activation – by admin