Setting up phpBB

By Jian Shuo Wang on 2004-09-25 17:31 · Backstage

Here is a record of the steps I followed to setup phpBB at my new server at http://bbs.wangjianshuo.com.

Choose the BBS Software

I tried yabb and some other BBS, and finally, I am convienced that phpBB is the right choice for me. I tested for sometime and believe it is the best I can find. ShanghaiExpat.com and chinese-forums.com are all powered by phpBB.

Download phpBB

The phpBB download page is at http://www.phpbb.com/downloads.php. I choosed phpBB 2.0.10 Full Package Zip version. It is pretty fast to get it to my local disk, costing me only 30 seconds over my Shanghai Telecom Broadband network from Ireland mirror. (The Windows XP SP2 download warning did pop up and I accepted it.

Upload phpBB

I hesitated a little bit before I go ahead to upload the codes for two reasons:

Whether I should modify some configuration files or setting files before I upload the downloade dpage?
Should I put the code under bbs folder directly or under a sub folder?

The answer to the first question is, “upload first”. According to the Quick Install section, it directed user to upload immediately after downloading. The safe bet is, the configuration can be done later. The config.php under root folder will be changed by code.

I decided to put all the phpBB code directly under bbs.wangjianshuo.com root folder. It is my best practice not to use the higher level of URL too early because the site need to expand. For example, I used /archives/ folder and /scripts/ folder to hold all the massive folders. If I didn’t create the folders and put all files under the root directory, it would be in a mass very soon and prevent me from future expanding the site.

The cons side of putting something deep is, it makes the URL too long and Google will give worse PageRank to it. Anyway, since bbs.wangjianshuo.com is dedicated to BBS, why not give the root to the files?

Congifure

Visit http://bbs.wangjianshuo.com/install/install.php (don’t bother to try this URL since at the time of this post, the files along with the folder have been deleted). The configuration is very straight forward. I created the MySQL 4.0 databases and users for it and configured evertything. Everything works like a charm. Then I deleted the /install and /contrib folder.

Restore

Since this is a migration, I backuped the database from my old server and restored it on the new location. Good. Everything works.

Change the Appearance

To make sure the forum looks the same as other pages on my wangjianshuo.com site network, I changed the appearance a little bit. I always got lost to identify the file I should modify. At last, I found it at /templates/subSilver/overall_header.tpl.

I added the global navigation structure under <body … line.