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)

phpBB Styles


If you look at several different phpBB forums, you may notice several differences in each forum. They may use different colors and images, display features in a different order, or omit some features entirely. This multitude of effects can be accomplished by using different phpBB styles. A phpBB style is the appearance of a forum, created by a combination of a layout, colors, and images. When you installed phpBB, the default style, called subSilver, was also installed. subSilver is the most commonly used style on phpBB forums, but there are well over two hundred different styles that have been publicly released. It is common for forums to have multiple styles available for user selection.

Note

When dealing with phpBB, you will sometimes see the terms style, theme, and template used interchangeably. In this chapter, themes and templates are defined as two smaller aspects of the overall style to reduce confusion. This is the way the terms are used most often in phpBB’s code and...