Article Index
10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website
5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments
5 Steps to Understanding HTML
5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look
6 Reasons Why You Need a Website
7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better
A Question of Scroll Bars
Ads Under the Radar Linking to Affiliates
AJAX Should You Believe the Hype
All About Design Principles and Elements
An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro
An Issue of Width the Resolution Problem
Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts Content Management Software
Beware the Stock Photographer Picking Your Pictures
Building a Budget Website
Building Online Communities
Clean Page Structure Headings and Lists
ColdFusion Quicker Scripting at a Price
Column Designs with CSS
Content is King
CSS and the End of Tables
Cut to the Chase How to Make Your Website Load Faster
Designing for Sales
Designing for Search Engines
Dont Be Scared Its Only Code HTML for Beginners
Dreamweaver The Professional Touch
Encryption and Security with SSL
Finding a Good HTML Editor
Focus on the User Task Oriented Websites
Fonts are More Important Than You Think
Free Graphics Alternatives
FrontPage Easy Pages
Hints All the Way
Hiring Professionals 5 Things to Look For
How Databases Work
How the Web Works
How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs
How to Install and Configure a Forum
How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites
How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy
How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat
IIS and ASP Microsofts Server
Image Formats GIF JPEG PNG and More
Its a World Wide Web Going International
JSP Java on Your Server
LAMP The Most Popular Server System Ever
Making Friends and Influencing People the Importance of Links
Making Searches Simple
Offering Free Downloads on Your Website
Opening a Web Shop with E Commerce Software
Perl Cryptic Power
Photoshop a Graphic Designers Dream
PHP Easy Dynamic Websites
Picking a Colour Scheme
Printing and Sending the Two Things Users Want to Do
Putting Multimedia to Good Use
Python and Ruby the Newer Alternatives
Registering a Domain Name
Registering Your Users by Stealth
RSS Really Simple Syndication
Setting Up a Mailing List
Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer
Some Places to Go For More Information
Taking HTML Further with Javascript
Taking HTML Further
Taking Your Website Mobile
Text Ads Unobtrusive Advertising
The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation
The Art of the Logo
The Basics of Web Forms
The Basics of Web Servers
The Case Against Flash
The Confusing World of Web Hosting Making Your Decision
The Evils of PDFs
The Importance of Validation
The Many Flavours of HTML
The Smaller the Better Avoiding Graphical Overload
The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes
The Web Designers Toolbox
The Web is Not Paper
Theres More than One Web Browser
Time for User Testing
Titles and Headlines Its Not a Newspaper
Tracking Your Visitors
Understanding Web Jargon
Uploading Your Website with FTP
Using Flash Sensibly
Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic
VBScript Javascript Made Easy
Websites and Weblogs Whats the Difference
What Do You Want Your Website to Do
What You See Isnt Always What You Get
Which Database is Right for You
Why Doing It Yourself is Best
Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away
Why Word is Bad for the Web
Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format
Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions
Working With Templates
Writing for the Web

How to Install and Configure a Forum

How to Install and Configure a Forum.

Once you've built your website, you might like to offer your visitors an opportunity to interact with it, and to talk to you and each other without having to use email. Forums are absolutely ideal for this purpose.

Choosing a Forum.

Before you can install a forum, you need to decide which forum software you want to use. In most cases, this decision will depend on what your server can run and whether or not you want to pay. Here are some of the options:

vBulletin (www.vbulletin.com). vBulletin is the most popular of the commercial forums. It costs either $85 per year or $160 plus $30 per year of updates. Despite its high cost, vBulletin has a large community who produce add-on functions for it that you can download for free. Many of the web's largest forums run on vBulletin, including the Something Awful forums. It uses PHP and MySQL.

Invision (www.invisionpower.com). Another commercial forum with a devoted community releasing add-ons, but not as large as vBulletin. Again, PHP and MySQL. Its pricing structure is also broadly similar to vBulletin's, but slightly more expensive. Really, you might as well use vBulletin instead of this.

Ikonboard (www.ikonboard.com). Ikonboard is a free forum (but not an open source one), written in Perl. It is now being developed by the community after its original developer abandoned it to work on Invision. Although many forums still use Ikonboard, most are moving away from it – it wouldn't be a good idea to start a new forum with it.

phpBB (www.phpbb.com). phpBB is a free and open source PHP forum that supports more or less every database system out there. It has a large community and an easy templating system, and is currently the most popular open source forum out there – it comes pre-installed on many hosts.

YaBB (www.yabbforum.com). YaBB is a free, open source forum written in Perl. What makes it unique, though, is that it doesn't need a database to run: it can create its own flat files to store threads and comments. This is a rare and useful feature if you don't want to deal with the hassle of database administration.

Installing Your Forum.

The installation process will, of course, vary depending on which forum you use – you should read the forum's 'readme' file that will come as part of the download. However, in general, the process will go like this:

1. Open the config file (called something like config.php or config.pl) and add your database details – that is, your database's name, and your username and password.

2. Upload all the forum's files to your server, preferably in a folder called 'forum'.

3. Go to the install.php/pl file using your web browser (ie. actually go to it at your website).

4. Follow the install script's instructions. This should create all the tables in your database automatically and let you create an administrator password for the forum.

5. Delete the install script (this is for security reasons).

Once you've done that, you've got your forum installed. You should now be able to log in as an administrator and change the forum's settings, including installing any templates you might want to.

Potential Problems.

There are quite a few problems you could run into while you're installing your forum.

Can't find install script. If you have trouble finding the install script to run it, check exactly where you uploaded the forum's files. You need to include the forum name in the URL, and the file may also be in an install sub-folder.

Install script fails. You need to make sure that you entered your database's details correctly into the config file, otherwise the forum won't be able to connect to your database. You should also remember that you often need to create the database itself even though you don't need to create the tables, as the forum won't usually do that for you.

Forum installs but then doesn't work. Make sure that you uploaded all the forum's files, keeping the subfolder structure intact. Don't upload the files from each subfolder separately: upload everything together, keeping the files in the correct subfolders.

If you run into any other problems, it may be a known issue with your software – check their help and support forums for more information.