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Advice needed setting up phpBB website
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The Placid Casual
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Join Date: May 2001
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Jan 16, 2010, 10:21 AM
 
Hi all,

Really need some advice on a new project I am thinking of undertaking, and figured here would be a good place to pick some brains!

In short, I want to set up a website that essentially will be a phpBB forum only. On this site I want to run some CPM adverts or something like Adsenese or Adsdaq.

I am technically minded, but sadly on the hardware and OS side of things, so have little experience in setting up a system such as the one above. I am wondering if anyone could explain things to me, or link through to any good online guides.

I have a domain bought, graphics and branding in progress, and was thinking of going for hosting at Bluehost.com, but other than that, could really do with some advice!

Any help/info appreciated!

TPC
     
mduell
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Jan 16, 2010, 03:18 PM
 
How can we possibly make a suggestion without traffic projections?
     
Thorzdad
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Jan 17, 2010, 11:58 AM
 
I moved this thread to Dev Center, where it should get more knowledgeable eyes.
     
besson3c
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Jan 17, 2010, 04:24 PM
 
My advice: generate your traffic *before* adding the ads. It won't be worth your while fussing over ads if you aren't getting the traffic, and it might deter people from providing traffic.

You are going to get a *ton* of spam registrations with phpBB, so be prepared to keep phpBB up-to-date and research different captchas and captcha options, unless you have some other sort of technique in mind.

You need a backup of your forum including all MySQL, and a complete clone of your forum so that you can test applying updates and making changes without impacting the live site. Practice exporting and importing data using mysqldump and the mysql command line binary, respectfully, and I would suggest learning something like git so that you can maintain revisions of your site that are easily documented, and so that you can backpeddle easily. If there is an online git repository for phpBB (say at GitHub), even better, this will save you from having to download it and unpacking it yourself after each update.

Definitely pick a host that offers SSH access so that you can do your mysqldumps and use Git. I would also automate your database backups via a cronjob, so look into setting up SSH public keys and using a tool such as rsync or scp.

Make sure that you are using the correct SMTP settings for the forum so that the SMTP server is reachable by the outside world, or else you might be preventing registrations by people using anti-spam services such as greylisting.
     
jelvischan
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Jan 27, 2010, 05:11 PM
 
Setting Up a phpBB Website should be fairly simple, and there are a couple things to take in mind:

If you want, you can host your website on an external web server or hosting service such as .Mac, which requires a subscription. Most mac users have a .Mac account and run iWeb from iLife to host their websites. Other websites are Webs - Make a free website, get free hosting or Bravenet - Web Hosting, Free Web Hosting and Web Tools. From there, you can create your theme, add your graphics, and then with an HTML Snippet, add an iframe with your phpBB site, like:

Code:
<iframe src="YourphpBBSiteURL" width="" height="" frameBorder="0"></iframe>
You can place the HTML code anywhere that you'd like for everyone to see, as long as the phpBB website remains active.

If you want, you can, if you have not already, enable your internal Apache Webserver. This should take only minutes with the online guide at Enabling PHP in Mac OS X 10.5.

With the server enabled, you can put the phpBB downloaded folder in your /Library/WebServer/Documents folder and visit it in the web browser. There, you should see your site.

You can change the theme and add graphics to the phpBB forum easily as long as you know basic HTML, or you can probably change it with the phpBB forum settings in the Admin Control Panel.

If you want to post ads, there are many javascript sites out there with codes to add ads, or if you have iWeb and a .Mac account, you can have the Google Adsense already created for you if desired.

I hope all of this helps!
Best of Luck!

Jelvis
     
   
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