The book starts with an overview of phpBB and online communities.Chapter 1 also gives some background information to phpBB, and gives you an idea of what you can achieve with phpBB with some real-life examples of phpBB-powered communities.

Chapter 2 walks you through a full installation of phpBB, including the necessary preparation work and post-installation tasks. It also looks at configuring the installation, and troubleshooting tips to get you started with your new forum and online community as quickly as possible.

After you are set up and running,Chapter 3 andChapter 4 dive straight into the phpBB environment, familiarizing you with the basics of configuring your site, creating forums and users, and introducing you to the basics of phpBB administration. In order to fully understand the different features and their administration, the chapter starts with a tour of phpBB from the user and administrator points of view.

Chapter 5 looks at some more ways to customize your forum’s appearance and features. Making these customizations is essential to giving your community a unique identity that makes it stand out among other online forums. The appearance of a forum is mainly controlled by phpBB’s styling system, which manages the colors, images, and visual layout of the forum. In this chapter, you will learn about the basics of a phpBB 2.0 style, adding and removing styles, fixing common style installation problems, customizing styles, and adding new features, including "modifications", to the forum.

Chapter 6 completes your mastery of phpBB administration. You will learn about making your board multi-lingual, configuring avatars, managing smilies, forum, user, and group permissions, as well as the human side of forum administration—moderation, flamewars, and banning.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code will be set as follows:

CREATE TABLE phpbb_tracker (
tracker_id mediumint(8) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker1 tinyint(1) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker2 varchar(40) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (tracker_id),
);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

CREATE TABLE phpbb_tracker (
tracker_id mediumint(8) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker1 tinyint(1) DEFAULT ‘0’ NOT NULL,
tracker2 varchar(40) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (tracker_id),

);

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

mysqldump -u dbuser -pdbpass forums > mydump.sql

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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