Book Image

phpBB: A User Guide

Book Image

phpBB: A User Guide

Overview of this book

phpBB is a free, open source Internet community application, with outstanding discussion forums and membership management. Written in the PHP scripting language, and making use of the popular MySQL database, phpBB is a standard among web hosting companies throughout the world, and is one of the most widely-used bulletin board packages in the world. This book is an abridged version of "Building Online Forums with phpBB 2", (ISBN 1904811132), focusing on a complete set of topics to help you set up and run your own phpBB-powered online community. This book gives you the power to use phpBB to set up and run your own online discussion forums with ease. It takes you through the whole process of setting up your phpBB site, and helps you create, customize, and manage your own online community with phpBB. Written by experienced phpBB administrators and enthusiasts, the emphasis is on simple and practical guidance for you to get the most from phpBB. Packed with step-by-step examples, this book is your ideal guide to learning phpBB.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

The Environment


In technical terms, here’s what you need in order to use phpBB:

  • The programming code to be executed

  • A database to store information

  • Web-server software, since this is a web application

  • A computer to run all this!

As you already know, phpBB is coded using the PHP server-side programming language. Additionally in order to run, phpBB needs a database. That’s where all discussions’ data is stored. There are different database systems out there that phpBB can work with, but the most popular and most commonly used in today’s PHP applications is MySQL. Finally, phpBB needs a web server and a computer running an operating system. phpBB can run on different operating systems and web servers, but it’s mostly used on a Linux platform with the Apache web server.

Using the web developers’ lingo, you might say that phpBB is mostly used in LAMP environments, where LAMP is an abbreviation for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. One important thing about the LAMP environment is that its components are free and open source. In practice "free and open-source" means:

  • You can use the software without paying for software licenses.

  • The programming code of the software is available to you if you want to modify it to better suit your needs.

Another good thing about phpBB is that it has very low requirements for the hosting server. Due to the fact that the phpBB environment consists of free software products, you can find a good and quite inexpensive hosting provider very easily. Just searching Google for "phpbb hosting" yields about a million results.