Starting Your Own Forum: How To Install phpBB

Having a forum on your website is not only a great way to form a community, it is also a great way to get “free content”. It allows you to learn a lot from your visitors from questions or interests they might have.

There are plenty of forum or billboard softwares out there. Invision Power Board (or IP.Board) and vBulletin comes to mind among commercial products. But among free softwares, phpBB might be the most popular one.

Today we’re going to see how to setup your own forum. You’ll see it’s not that difficult.

How To Install phpBB

For this tutorial, I will be using my InMotion Hosting account. I’ve got the Power package from the Business Class plans. I’ll be using this web host because their Business Hosting is faster than most personnal web hosting plans. Still you’ll be able to follow up as long as you got a cPanel hosting account.

Ready? Ok let’s start!

The first thing we’re going to do is to create a MySQL database. Assuming you’re already logged in cPanel, click on the MySQL Databases icon.

Now enter a name for the database you want to create. For this tutorial, we’ll name our database phpbb.

Original huh? Great, let’s keep going! Hit the Create Database button to proceed. When you get to the page that says that the database has been created, click on the Go Back link.

We now have a database but that’s not enough. Without a user account associated to this database it will be impossible to use it.

In fact, you could use it with your cPanel user account to access this MySQL database but you don’t want to do that, trust me. It would be a big security issue because you’d have to store your cPanel password into phpBB’s configuration file in plain text.

Scroll down to the Add New User section and enter a username and password. Click on Create User when you’re done.

We now have a database and a user. The only thing left to do is to add this newly created user to the database. Hit the Add button when you’re done.

By the way, I’ve removed my username from the screenshot above for security reasons.

Our database is all setup now so we can move forward to installing phpBB.  Head over to http://www.phpbb.com/downloads/ and click on the Download phpBB link. You will be brought to another page where you should see  a section named Full Package. Click on the Download phpBB 3.0.2 (zip) link right below. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 3.0.2.

Clicking on the download link will bring you to SourceForge.net where the download should begin automatically. Save the file to a temporary folder on your hard drive and unzip it using your favorite compression utility.

Now using an FTP client (such as Filezilla), connect to your FTP server using your account’s username and password. Upload the content extracted from the phpBB archive to your public_html folder. When you’re done, the public_html directory should contain these subdirectories: adm, cache, docs, download, files, images, etc.

Next open your browser to your homepage. You will be greeted with a phpBB introduction page with three (3) tabs at the top. Click on the INSTALL tab. This will bring you to a page that says “Welcome to Installation”. Click on the Proceed to next step button at the bottom.

On the Installation Compatibility page, the phpBB installer will try to detect any incompatibility problems. If any are found, try contacting your hosting provider to resolve these issues. If everything is okay, click on the Start Install button.

On the Database configuration page, you will be prompted to enter the information for the MySQL database you’ve just created earlier. Enter the required information and proceed to the next step. If your database server isn’t localhost then try contacting your web host.

If you’ve done everything correctly, you should see a Successful connection message. Click on Proceed to next step.

We’re almost there now, don’t give up! From the Administrator configuration page, enter the administrator username. Please use something else than admin or administrator! Try to use something no one will be able to guess.

Then simply fill the administrator password and email address and proceed to next step. You should see a Tests passed message if all went correctly, so click on Proceed to next step. This should create a configuration file from the database and administrator information you’ve just entered. Click on Proceed to next step again.

On the Advanced Settings page you can leave all default values. This way all emails will be sent using the Sendmail( ) function instead of SMTP. So unless you want to run your forum on a secured server (HTTPS), leave every settings by default and hit Proceed to next step.

At this point, the phpBB installer will create all the necessary database tables and populate them with some initial data. Click on Proceed to next step.

You should now see a Conguratulations! message confirming that everything went okay (hopefully!). Click on the Login button at the bottom to start using your forum.

You should now see a red warning box at the top saying that you need to delete the install directory. Use your FTP client to do so. The install directory should be located under public_html.

We’re now done with the phpBB installation. Open your web browser to your homepage and you should see a nice phpBB forum:

Yay! We’ve now got a brand new forum! Isn’t that the greatest day in your life? Okay maybe not.

This tutorial isn’t meant to teach you how to run a forum because there are a lot of things you can do with phpBB. But if I were to give you an advice it would be to search for some phpBB security tips and best pratices.

Having a forum can be a huge security breach and you don’t want to have your website hacked, believe me.

A forum can also put a huge load on the webserver so if you start getting a lot of users, try contacting your web hosting company and make sure you’re not about to get your account shut down. Chances are you’ll need to move to either a VPS or a dedicated server if your forum is gaining in popularity.

Web Hosts Recommended by phpBB

• ICD Soft
• HostICan
• VistaPages
• Bluehost
• WebHostingPad
• SiteGround
• HostMonster

Links

• phpBB Homepage
• phpBB Mods
• phpBB User Community
• InMotion Hosting

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