[george328]

I'm looking into setting up a forum online for friends and family to discuss vacation details, wedding planning, etc. so as to free up the confusion of multiple emails flying back and forth.

I'm a complete newbie, is there a service such as these guys:

http://www.ipshosting.com/?forumhosting

but for a mac user?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-George

[Arkham_c]

There are tons of free forum packages out there. There's even one that looks a LOT like this site (http://phpmybb.sourceforge.net/). If you have a place to host it, you're all set.

If not, find a site that offers hosting and either has forum software installed or allows you to install your own.

[gianni_t]

Hi! My name is Gianni, I'm the developer of phpmybb. Thanks you for your interest on my board but phpmybb is under heavy development and so it is not yet a stable board so don't use it in a production environment.

Bye bye.

[kampl]

I think that PHPBB will suit your needs. Pretty good stuff.

[skalie]

As kampl said PHPBB is pretty much the bees knees for free, but in the case that you might need something really, really easy to use, you might want to take a look at phorum.

(hosting with Php and Mysql a prerequisite)

[RGB]

My best friend is the owner of OpenBB, so I'm a bit biased, but it really is great bulletin board software, with many new features coming now that he's in control of development.

http://forums.openbb.com

[george328]

Thanks everyone for your input I'll take a look at your suggestions today, sorry for the slow response, now that I'm finally caught up with work, I have some free time to look into creating my forum.

[george328]

edit: Ryan, I went to openbb and signed up for the free hosting which sounds as if the forum software will be installed already? If so, this will by far be the easiest solution for me. I've left the original post below because once I'm familiar with forum software I will probably eventually want to move everything to my own unique domain.

----------------------------------

Okay everyone, maybe I'm in over my head.

When I said I was a newbie, I really meant it, but I'm a fast learner. I've been working with macs for 12 years (designer) so I'm familiar with the computer aspect, but as to websites, well, let me tell you what I know..

I have a mac (pb 17").

I have a domain registered to me.

I know how to get someone to host my website.

That's as far as I know.

As far as I can make out, I need to somehow upload forum software to my registered domain that is being hosted by someone. Yes? After which whenever I go to my domain name, the forum will pop up?

Looking at phpBB, this is all greek to me:

If you have shell access to your account, you may want to upload the entire phpBB 2.0 archive (in binary mode!) to a directory on your host and unzip it there. If you do not have shell access or do not wish to use it, you will need to decompress the phpBB 2.0 archive to a local directory on your system. From there you must FTP all the files it contains (being sure to retain the directory structure) to your host. All .php, .inc, .sql, .cfg, .htm and .tpl files should be uploaded in ASCII mode, while all graphics should use binary mode. If you are unfamiliar with what this means, please refer to your FTP client documentation. In most cases this need not concern you since many FTP clients will automatically guess the correct mode to use.

If the file extension used to execute PHP scripts on your server is not .php but, for example, .php3 or .phtml, you should first rename all files ending in .php and change the value of $phpEx in extension.inc. In the vast majority of cases this step will be unnecessary.


So, as before any help would be GREATLY APPRECIATED, or if this is more complicated than I think, let me know. I think I have the gist of it, just need it clarified I think.

-George

[skalie]

Originally posted by george328:
As far as I can make out, I need to somehow upload forum software to my registered domain that is being hosted by someone.

The host must have Php and Mysql for it to work.

Yes? After which whenever I go to my domain name, the forum will pop up?

Sort of, you will have to go to your domain, navigate to the "install.php" file and then answer a few tricky questions about passwords etc. It basically installs itself.

www.phpbb.com features a very helpfull support forum, and it way cool when you actually get the thing to work.

[godzookie2k]

they're pretty easy to get running, but getting them customized is a muther...@#$@#. er. Then again, I could just be picky about how much I want control of, I mean, after all, I *am* writing my own Moveable type front end.

[george328]

Just an update, obbhost.com worked out great, all I had to do was upload openbb, very fast setup, now I have a simple forum that I can tinker with in the future. Thanks everyone for their help.