Your One-Stop Forum Solution: phpBB

Installing a forum on your website will help to increase traffic and return visits.

1. You will need to start off by downloading a current installation package from http://www.phpbb.com/. You are going to want to download the full package as a (zip), or if you’re a Linux person the (bz2). Once the download is finished you are ready to start setting up.

2. Open up your favorite FTP client and connect to the site you want to place your forum on.

At this point you need to decide if you want your forum to be in the root directory of your site or in a sub folder. Either is fine, but you should make the decision now, as it will be a lot of work to move the forum later on. For my forum, I am simply going to create a sub domain called Forum. That way the URL of my forum will be forum.gordonfrench.com. (You can create a sub domain by logging in to your cpanel. Looking for an icon called sub domains.) Now that I have the location figured out, I am going to unzip the phpBB package we downloaded to a folder on my desktop. Then we need to upload everything in that folder to our server. I am not going to upload the folder, just the contents. If you upload the folder, your forum would now be located in the root directory and you would have to type the name of the folder when trying to access the forum.

3. After everything is uploaded, open up Firefox or whatever browser you prefer and access the location you uploaded the files to. In my case the files are located at forum.gordonfrench.com. If everything is correct, you should be redirected to the phpBBinstall screen.

4. Click on the Install tab. Save this tab for later.

It is time to head back to your control panel and set up a database to store the great posts your forum is soon to have.
Go to www.yoursite.cpanel or log in to your hosting account and find your MySQL area. For most hosting accounts you will have a typical cpanel with a database section.

5. Click on the MySQL Database Wizard.

6. Create a new database called Forum.

7. Create a username and password. Give the new user all privileges.

Your new database is ready to go!

The database is created and ready to go, so we need to move back to the phpBB installer.

8. You can click Proceed to next step. This page is a checklist just letting you know what is going on. If you are using one of the larger hosting companies like HostGator or GoDaddy, everything should be fine. If not, you may need to contact your hosting company to have them make any needed changes. For me everything is okay. I have a few warnings but nothing that will stop the forum or cause any problems.

9. After scrolling to the bottom of the page, you will see a Start Install button. Go ahead and start the install.

You should get a screen asking for your database settings. These are for the database we just created. Database type is MySQL, and the next two fields can be left blank. The next three fields are for the database we just created and the last field can be left phpbb_.

10. Once you have everything filled in, click Proceed to next step. Hopefully, you get a screen that says “test connection successful.” If not, you will need to look over the settings for the database name, username, and password. In my case and for anyone using HostGator, you may need to add your username to the name of the database. My database is called gfrench_forum. Once you get a successful message, just proceed on.

11. The next page is asking for the administrator settings. This is going to be the person associated with taking care of the forum. At this point, I would simply put in your information. You can always add more administrators later.

12. Go ahead and proceed through the next few pages until you get to email settings. If you are unfamiliar with these settings, you can simply leave the default values and proceed on. In my case the default settings will work nicely. Hit proceed a few more times and you’re ready to go.

13. Click the login button and log in as the administrator you created.

Important: See the red warning. You MUST delete or rename the install directory. Go back to your FTP client and connect to your server. Navigate to the location you uploaded all your forum files to. Look for a folder called Install. Right click on this folder and select rename. You need to change the name of this folder. Something as simple as old_install will work fine. I prefer not to delete this folder because it will be helpful to have if you ever need to move the forum.

Congratulations, your forum is ready to go!