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