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)

Searching


Pretty soon your forums will be full of topics that will span more than one topics-listing page. This will make it a bit difficult to locate a specific older topic. phpBB’s search feature comes to the rescue here. It’s accessible through the Search top-navigation link. The search form gives you many options to find your topic of interest, such as which forum to search, how to display the results, and so on.

Chances are you and your members will ignore most of the search options in your searches. After all, we are so used to simple search boxes like Google’s, for example, that we rarely look for other options. But there is one simple option here that can help you a lot. This option is Search for all terms. It helps when you search using more than one word. Unlike Google, where the results will be narrowed when you add more words, phpBB will search for each individual word and return more results (broadening the search as opposed to narrowing it). For example, if you search for milk...