HomePHP Page 4 - Talking The Talk (A phpBB Primer)
Starting Up - PHP
Looking for a full-featured message board to add interactivity to your site, or to communicate with your customers or users? Look no further than phpBB, a robust, open-source PHP implementation that is both easy to use and simple to administer. This introductory tutorial discusses the process of installing, configuring and using phpBB, explaining how to create discussion forums, add users, assign moderators and administrators, and post and search for messages.
Once the application has been properly installed, phpBB will automatically log you in as the administrator and drop you into the administration module so that you can begin configuring the system for use. In case it doesn't, point your browser to the "admin/" directory under the installation (continuing the example above, the complete URL would be "http://medusa/phpBB2/admin/") and you should see something like this:
Each section of the administration module deals with a specific aspect of the system - here's a brief list:
Forum Administration: This section allows you to create and manage discussion forums, organize them into categories, and decide the access levels for each.
General Administration: This section allows you to configure the application for service, controlling variables like file paths, posts to display per page, date and time formats, default user and forum settings, and mail server configuration. It also allows you to back up and restore the system database, and configure smileys, avatars and word control lists.
Group Administration: This section allows you to organize users into groups, and assign permissions to these groups.
Style Administration: This section allows you to define layouts and style sheets for the system, allowing you to add new themes, alter the currently-selected theme, and export themes.
User Administration: This section allows you to manage the users registered in the system, assigning them appropriate permissions and setting access control rules.
Your first stop should be the "Configuration" component of the "General Administration" section.
As you will see, most of the items here are fairly self-explanatory. You should go through them and alter those you see fit...although most of the time, the defaults will do just fine. Pay special attention to the domain name, script path and SMTP server settings, errors in this may cause the application to malfunction.
Once you're done, save your settings, and flip the page to configure the forums themselves.
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