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)

Managing Smilies


phpBB comes with a default set of smilies, but you can change the defaults or add new ones. In fact, your users may request that you add more smilies, because the defaults may not be enough for them to express their emotions. Or it’s just that some of your members may be used to seeing different smilies in other boards that they visit, and miss those cute graphics in your board.

As you know already, smilies and emoticons are synonyms. "Smilies" is a more widespread term, while "emoticons" is probably more accurate, because not all of the small round faces are smiling. One other interesting thing is that the word "smilie" can be spelled as "smilie" and "smiley". phpBB prefers "smiley" but a Google search returned more results on "smilie", so it’s apparently more often used. In this book, we’ve adopted "smilie".

phpBB gives you the ability to:

  • Edit or delete an existing smilie

  • Add new smilies one by one

  • Add new smilies in batches using the special .pak files

  • Create .pak files using...