And that brings us to the end of this tutorial. In this article, I introduced you to phpBB, an open-source discussion forum, and explained (with a small case study) how you can use it to add interactivity to a Web site. This article discussed the process of installing the application, setting up its database and tables, and configuring it for service. I showed you how to create discussion forums and organize them into categories, add users, assign moderators and administrators, and post and search for messages in the various forums.

These are the most common operations an administrator or user would need to perform in the context of a discussion board; however, phpBB also offers a number of additional features for more specialized requirements, and the latter part of the tutorial examined these in brief as well.

While phpBB is one of the better options available, there's certainly no shortage of alternatives when it comes to Web-based discussion forums. In case you're looking for alternatives, you should consider visiting the following links:

Drupal, at http://www.drupal.org/

Sporum, at http://www.sporum.org/

BazookaBoard, at http://www.bazookaboard.com/

NeoBoard, at http://www.neoboard.net

PHPTalk, at http://www.phptalk.org/

Zorum, at http://zorum.phpoutsourcing.com

The official Web site for phpBB is http://www.phpbb.com/ Now that you've seen a preview, drop by and get yourself a copy. And once you've got an active forum community running on your site, don't forget to drop me a line and tell me all about it. Until then...stay healthy!

Note: Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!