Forum with phpBB

Olympus version offers a great platform for even beginners to play around before the actual implementation. Simply install the archive file to whatever server/machine you want to and then follow the instruction through the URL. Just make sure after installation you point an URL in a web browser to (http://www.example.com/phpBB3), phpBB will detect that it is not yet installed and automatically redirect you to the installation screen. There is a very detailed step by step procedure provided in this knowledge based article. Please go through it as writing the same thing will just occupy unecessary space: http://www.phpbb.com/support/documentation/3.0/quickstart/quick_installation.php
Once you manage to download and install the package, you have to decide which databse application to use such as MySQL, sqlserver or oracle. Decide your database name/password etc. Do not change the prefix coloumn and leave it to its default. Afterwards, create the admin user details. If the installation was successful, you can now use the Login button to visit the Administration Control Panel. Congratulations, you have installed phpBB 3.0 successfully. But there is still a lot of work ahead! Now once you are finished with the installation of the forum, database and other settings above. You need to customise the forum according to your use.

Building a Professional Forum (phpBB)

In this post I'll making you all familiar of how you can build a forum from scratch. There are number of third party vendors to provide the built-in tools. One of the open source I normally go for (recommended by an experienced colleague) is phpBB. I will be discussing the latest version as to date which is BB3 (3.0.6) also code named Olympus.

A forum is basically a chat web-page where users needs to log-in and can discuss their questions and answers, create polls, upload images and avatars and so on. You can also call it as a bulletin board system with extensive administration panel. It's under GPL license which is free and uses PHP as programming language. In the next post I will guide you how can we create, design and modify a bulletin forum system through phpBB. :-)