Help With Installing Php Forum On My Site. Please?

Got to thinking... although I've never used it - most Cpanels will have either Fantastico or Simple Scripts (or maybe both) - these scripts will effortlessly put the script of your choice on your hosting package, and they usually include phpBB and SMF, among others.

This will make putting a forum up simplistically easy, even for an absolute beginner.

Most forum scripts work in a similar fashion - first you'll need a place to put it - I generally put it as a subdirectory to my main website - so like here: the main site is BurningKnife.com - and the forum is Burningknife.com/forum - so you can see that it's in a subdirectory.

There is another way to do it, where the URL would be forum.example.com - and the advantage there is that search engines see that as a completely different website from 'example.com'.  Whereas the way I have it set up, search engines know that the forum is just part of my website, it's not two different websites.

Once you've decided where to put the script (forgot a step here ... you'll now need to go download it!) - you FTP the script to your chosen directory - I use FileZilla, it's free and it works quite well. Next step will be to log into you Cpanel - and create a new MySQL database - I usually use a name that will tell me what the database is for... so I might call it 'forum'.  On most servers, this would be added to your website name... if you have 'Example.com', many servers will reference you as 'examplecom' - and your newly created database would be called 'examplecom_forum' (note the underscore).

Next, you need to create a username, using the same CPanel MySQL script, click on the link at the top right that says: "Jump to MySQL Users"... and here's a trick - you don't need to chose another name!  So I create a 'user' called 'forum' - the website changes it to 'examplecom_forum' - so the name is the same as the database... Be sure to make a note of the password you use.

Next, using the same CPanel MySQL script that you used to create the database and name - you must tell the server that the 'name' has rights to that 'database name'.  You usually just click the same "Jump to MySQL Users" - and you should see something that says: "Add User to Database"... select the name & database, click "Add", and then click the "All Privileges" checkbox.

That's basically it for the database creation.

At this point, it's going to depend on what forum script you're using - some scripts will just about completely self-install - others will be a tad more difficult, they might involve setting file permissions.  But they will all need to know the database name, database user, and where the database is - so the answers will look like this:

Localhost
examplecom_forum (database)
examplecom_forum (username)
Password123 (Username password)

I'm most familiar with SMF (Simple Machine Forum), which is free and powerful, but other forum scripts will have similar setups. I just took a look at phpBB.com - and it will be quite similar to what I just laid out above - it's a script-based forum just like SMF.  They also have a really good forum on their site to help people through installing their script - and they'd be more familiar with their script, I've never run a phpBB forum before. So just go to their site, and -download- their current version, I suspect that it probably has an "install.txt" file inside the zip... most scripts do.  phpBB is an advanced enough forum that I don't think you should have too much trouble installing it - their instructions should be clear enough, I suspect.

But above are the basic steps - if someone has experience with phpBB and can correct anything I've said here - please jump in.