OT phpBB

Legacy Dynamo
1

I apologise for posting to this list, but a fellow Freeway user suggested that it might be possible for me to find some answers here. I have been stumbling around in the dark all weekend, and I’m simply wasting too much time now struggling on my own.

I have been asked to take over an existing medium sized very successful phpBB Forum, and my present knowledge level of phpBB is worse than zero, rather like when I started with Freeway 3.5 a few years ago. For unbeknown reasons, the guy who started the board, although happy to hand over whatever I might need, is so far reluctant, read point blank refuses, to communicate by telephone.

After a couple of false starts, I now have xampp & phpBB3 successfully installed, and have also succeeded in launching a small test Forum. Obviously I need to learn exactly what is involved before going live, and I have a few months in hand, so time is not a problem. What I need therefore is to be able to create a successful local installation so that I can work my way through the learning curve offline.

Here is the problem. As well as not wanting to discuss anything by telephone, the existing Forum is put together on a PC, so even the instructions I am receiving tend to be a tad difficult to follow. Among the files which I have received, are what purports to be a copy of the Forum, and this is what I have been told.

"Before we start delete all files in the htdocs folder but not the xampp
folder.

Download and copy the phpbb3 files from the link I sent you to the htdocs
folder in Xampp. http://www.blah blah/download/htdocs.zip

Copy the files from this link http://www.blah blah/download/phpbb3.zip
into the .xamppmysqldata folder."

The problems I have are in knowing to which xampp “htdocs” folder he is referring, as there is an “htdocs” folder on the xampp top level, and also an “htdocs” folder within the xamppfiles folder on the second level? Also he doesn’t specify quite what he means by “delete all files in the htdocs folder but not the xampp folder” as it would seem as if at least the “Webalizer” folder should be retained.

Secondly, I can find no trace of any “mysql data” folder anywhere within the entire xampp app folder, nor as it happens within the phpBB folder either. Maybe the dot before the initial / of the “.xamppmysqldata folder” indicates where to look, but if so, it passes me by.

I understand that of course phpBB is platform agnostic, but should this mean that all the existing files created within the PC environment will happily transfer over to the Mac OS??

If there is a possibility that any UK based php guru is reading this, and could mentor me for a week or two, then I would also be extremely grateful.

Once again, my apologies for an OT topic which is absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Freeway, and I do appreciate any time taken to post any replies.

Many thanks

Neil Carter
Oxford UK

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2

Might be worth reposting in Off Topic as well - as the Dynamo list tends to be read by more code able people. Not necessarily with phpBB experience.

David

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phpBB expects a slight amount of PHP or server-side scripting experience before use, so your first step might be to go to Keith Martin’s tutorial site at PHP and MySQL Explained: lessons, script samples and book recommendations and read the whole thing (it’s not that long).

Second, when your developer is referring to “delete everything”, I am willing to bet that a good translation of that is “delete any index.html or index.php you find in the Web root directory (the folder on the server where the Apache Web server looks for its files to serve), along with any folders that have the same name as the folders you are about to copy over to the server.”

You are correct in guessing that you’d wand to retain the Webalizer stuff. You might also want to turn on the “show hidden files” feature of your FTP/SFTP application and look carefully both at what is on the server and what is in the folder your developer sent to you. Odds are great that there will be one or more “dot-files” in those directories. “Dot-files” are text files or directories that are named with a leading dot, and thus are normally invisible.

There are two special cases of dot-files – . and …, which will be found at the top of any directory listing. You can ignore these, but you should never attempt to copy, move, or delete them.

The one dot-file you should look for and worry about is called .htaccess. This is an Apache instruction file that configures special Web server settings for the directory it is found in, as well as for any sub-directory of that directory. If your server already has an .htaccess file in it, and you copy over the phpBB .htaccess file, you can expect some measure of awkwardness to occur.

The way to manage this safely is to open both files in a programmer’s text editor, and make sure to add the phpBB directives to the existing .htaccess file. This may also cause some excitement in your server, but at least you won’t be removing the known-working file in the process of installing phpBB.

phpBB is a very mature piece of software, and it’s fairly well written. It is also about as far away (philosophically) from Freeway as you can get and still be hosting Web pages. Your interaction with it will be limited to installing it, getting it to run on your server, and then finding a template that looks “close enough” and further tweaking that template with a CSS editor or text editor.

I wish you much patience, and good luck.

Walter

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