I found it when I was idly browsing through the list of features on cPanel that came with my HostGator account. Not that it was obvious.
Rewind back in time a few days...
I noticed a lot of other forums were using this phpBB code that was apparently free open source. So I found the website
http://.phpbb.com and set up my first effort there. They host your forum on their server, but you don't get much in the way of instruction or support.
That would have been fine, but I wanted the forum on my own server so that it would be a content asset to my website. I couldn't figure out how to move it over and there wasn't any obvious tutorial or manual that said how. And I didn't really have time to fiddle with it (at my pace it would have taken days, if not weeks!)
Fast forward to Monday and back to HostGator's cPanel.
I was curious as to what Fantastico was, so I opened it an lo and behold, there was phpbb in the list. It was as simple as anything to load it onto my public.html folder and voila! It took about a day to set the actual forum layout up as you have to do that via the admin panel - creating each individual topic is time consuming and so was setting up all the authorisations. I'm still tweaking that now.
The forum works perfectly, just like the many others that are around. I just want to change the layout ever so slightly - I can live with the colour scheme as it's easy to read and more importantly easy on the eyes. I just want to squeeze it in a bit at the sides, put my banner over the top and maybe add some advertising (but not too much).
I'm sure it can't be too hard - maybe it just means fiddling with the style sheet and index files. I'll see when I get some spare time... in between trying to make some money promoting the site, building my next niche site, creating more content and stopping every now and then to eat!
Did I mention sleep as well???
