Every month or so, I get the wild idea that I would like to start up a new forum.
The glorious days when forums are filled, messages are flying back and forth, moderators in place, revenue generation from advertising … right.
Building a forum and getting traffic to your new forum takes time, patience and the ability to woo people to your site … and there better be a good reason for them to visit back.
Having the right forum software is important. You want something that is easy to manage, lightweight, simple to configure and more.
I may be wrong, but I literally installed PunBB in less than 10 minutes. Downloaded from site, unzipped, uploaded to server, set up MySQL database, ran install file and voila … instant forums.
What are my forum goals?
Everyone has a goal for their forums.
Mine are SEO optimization, search engine friendly URLs using mod_rewrite, and RSS forum feeds to syndicate with blogs and such.
Also looking for easy administration, forum category set-up, user management and stuff that will come up that I have not even thought about. It always happens as you go.
Where some forums are built with classic tables, PunBB utilizes CSS & XHTML to produce fast, clean and efficient pages.
Requirements:
Web server (preferably Apache).
PHP 4.1.0 or later (PHP 5 included).
MySQL 3.23.17 or later, PostgreSQL 7.0 or later or SQLite.
Here are some links to get caught up:
Download: http://punbb.org/downloads.php
Forums: http://punbb.org/forums/
Installation: http://wiki.punres.org/PunBB_Installation_and_Upgrade_Instructions
Wiki: http://wiki.punres.org/Wiki_index
