Preface

phpBB is a free, open-source Internet community application, with outstanding discussion forums and membership management. Written in the PHP scripting language, and making use of the popular MySQL database, phpBB is a standard among web-hosting companies throughout the world, and is one of the most widely used bulletin-board packages in the world. phpBB short-circuits the need for you to be a web development master in order to create and manage massive online communities.

This book is an abridged version of "Building Online Forums with phpBB 2", (ISBN 1904811132), focusing on a complete set of topics to help you set up and run your own phpBB-powered online community. In easy to follow language and with clear instructions, you will learn how to install your own system, tackle basic forum administration tasks, and customize the forum.

What This Book Covers

The book starts with an overview of phpBB and online communities.Chapter 1 also gives some background information to phpBB, and gives you an idea of what you can achieve with phpBB with some real-life examples of phpBB-powered communities.

Chapter 2 walks you through a full installation of phpBB, including the necessary preparation work and post-installation tasks. It also looks at configuring the installation, and troubleshooting tips to get you started with your new forum and online community as quickly as possible.

After you are set up and running,Chapter 3 andChapter 4 dive straight into the phpBB environment, familiarizing you with the basics of configuring your site, creating forums and users, and introducing you to the basics of phpBB administration. In order to fully understand the different features and their administration, the chapter starts with a tour of phpBB from the user and administrator points of view.

Chapter 5 looks at some more ways to customize your forum’s appearance and features. Making these customizations is essential to giving your community a unique identity that makes it stand out among other online forums. The appearance of a forum is mainly controlled by phpBB’s styling system, which manages the colors, images, and visual layout of the forum. In this chapter, you will learn about the basics of a phpBB 2.0 style, adding and removing styles, fixing common style installation problems, customizing styles, and adding new features, including "modifications", to the forum.

Chapter 6 completes your mastery of phpBB administration. You will learn about making your board multi-lingual, configuring avatars, managing smilies, forum, user, and group permissions, as well as the human side of forum administration—moderation, flamewars, and banning.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code will be set as follows:

CREATE TABLE phpbb_tracker (
tracker_id mediumint(8) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker1 tinyint(1) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker2 varchar(40) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (tracker_id),
);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

CREATE TABLE phpbb_tracker (
tracker_id mediumint(8) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker1 tinyint(1) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker2 varchar(40) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (tracker_id),

);

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

mysqldump -u dbuser -pdbpass forums > mydump.sql

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader Feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book, what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply drop an e-mail to <[e-mail]>, making sure to mention the book title in the subject of your message.

If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or e-mail <[e-mail]>.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer Support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the Example Code for the Book

Visit http://www.packtpub.com/support, and select this book from the list of titles to download any example code or extra resources for this book. The files available for download will then be displayed.

Note

The downloadable files contain instructions on how to use them.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our contents, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in text or code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing this you can save other readers from frustration, and help to improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the Submit Errata link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata have been verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata added to the list of existing errata. The existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.

Questions

You can contact us at <[e-mail]> if you are having a problem with some aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.