phpBB3 is a widely used application, allowing you to create and administer forums on your website.

It's wise to have a database dedicated to your forum. Let's go crazy, and call it “forum”.

If you don't (yet) know how to go about this, please read this tutorial.

You have a choice here. For “neatness'” sake, such applications are generally placed in a folder within the www sub-domain (www.example.com/forum) or in a specific sub-domain of its own (forum.example.com).

Easy! Just make sure the you create a specific folder for the store (as in www.example.com/forum)

Two things to do:

• Configure your server for this sub-domain, as explained in this tutorial.
• Configure your sub-domain to point to the server you have just configured, as explained in this tutorial.

This is the option we will be using in the rest of the tutorial.

To begin with, we need to download it.

Nothing beats the official site to get the intial compressed file. I therefore recommend this link.

Now that you've downloaded the file onto your favorite hard drive, decompress it. You now have a folder (let's rename it forum) containing all of the phpBB3 files.

Launch your favorite FTP client (we recommend FileZilla) and log in as admin onto your server. Then, open the folder corresponding to the VirtualHost you had initially defined.

In our example, the path of the FTP would therefore be:

/srv/d_my-gandai-ai/www/forum.example.com/htdocs

…that is, unless you've changed the initial configuration of the web files. If that's the case, however, I'm assuming you knew what you were doing. :)

At this stage, we can upload the phpBB3 files onto your server.

• If you created a forum.example.com kind of virtual host, you will want phpBB3 to come up as the front page (i.e. not within a folder in the sub-domain) and you should therefore upload the content of the forum folder into the htdocs folder of your sub-domain.
• If you're not a fan of sub-domains and prefer a good old example.com/forum, then you need to upload the complete folder into htdocs (or another folder if you want).

For phpBB3 to configure properly, certain folders and files will need specific rights. In most cases, to change these rights with your FTP client, all you need to do is right-click on the file concerned and chose the right term in the menu (could be Rights, CHMOD, Properties…). Supposing you were using FileZilla, this is how the client would operate:

Right-click the concerned file and select “File Attributes…”. The window that has just opened gives you two different methods to change the file rights: boxes to tick and numeric values.

The point of the tutorial not being to teach the numeric values of rights in UNIX, let's just say you can simply replace the numeric value by 777.

The following files and folders will need its rights changed:

config.php
cache
files
store
images/avatars/upload

Launch your web browser, and access your forum's folder on your server which, in our example, would be forum.example.com.

Welcome to your forum's setup page. You will be greetd by an overview text which you are, of course, encouraged to read. Once you have read it, click the INSTALL tab at the top-left part of the page.

Once you have read the introduction text, you can click Proceed to next step.

phpBB3 will check if everything is configured properly for the forum to be able tu run. If you have followed these introductions, you should be allowed to click the Start install button at the bottom of the page.

Please fill-in the fields as follows:

Database type: MySQL with MySQLi extension

Database server hostname or DSN: localhost

Database server port: (you can leave this blank)

Database name: At the very beginning of this tutorial, we had called it blog.

Database username: This is the username you created at the same time you chose a name for this database…

Database password: …and its password.

Prefix for tables in database: You can leave this field with its default value.

The rest of the setup is straightforward and you will only be asked basic identification info for you to create and manage this blog. However, there is one technical aspect which should still be covered:

If you will want to allow phpBB3 to send emails to your forum users, you will need to configure an SMTP server.

To do so, you'll first need to create a (free) Gandi Mail on your domain name of choice. This is done in the Domains section of your Gandi Administration interface.

Once you have created an email such as admin@mywebsite.com, return to the phpBB3 setup window, and fill-in the E-mail settings section as follows:

Enable board-wide e-mails: Enabled

Use SMTP server for e-mail: Yes

SMTP server address: smtp.mywebsite.com

Authentication method for SMTP: LOGIN

SMTP username: This is the username of the Gandi Mail address you created…

SMTP password: …and its password.

The rest of the setup is a piece of cake, and you can leave the remaining configuration fields with their default values.

For more information on configuring your phpBB3 forum, please visit the official phpBB website.

• Installation guide for phpBB 3.0.9 on Gandi Simple Hosting