How to make a forum on the website

Currently, forums are an integral part of many online projects. Forums allow you to communicate in a simple, natural and familiar form, thereby creating the conditions for the formation of strong permanent community of users. There are projects where the forum is surpassed in popularity the main information website, became in fact the nucleus of the resource. That is why the question about the necessity of installation of the forum is considered one of the first in the elaboration of a new concept for the web site. Fortunately, these days it is not necessary to puzzle over how to make a forum on the website, due to the existence of several popular forum engines, both paid and free.

You will need

Website hosting that allow execution of PHP-scripts and creating MySQL databases. A modern web browser. Program FTP client. Data for access to the site via FTP. Access to the administrative panel of the hosting account of the website.

Instruction

Download the latest version of the distribution package of the SMF forum. Open in your browser http://www.simplemachines.org. Click the "Download " SMF". On the opened page, select "zip" under "Full install". Will start the download process. Save the distribution archive to your hard drive.

Unpack the distribution SMF. Create on the hard disk to a new directory. Extract it the archive with the engine files forum. To do this, use an unpacker or unpacking functions of the file Manager.

Create a subdomain for a forum on the domain of the site. Go to the control panel of the hosting account. Select the domain of the website on which you will install the forum. Go to manage subdomains. Add a new subdomain.

Download the scripts forum hosting. Connect to the site server by using an FTP client or the file Manager. Navigate to the root directory of the subdomain forum on the server. Copy all files the distribution package from the folder on your hard drive to a folder on the server.

Create a MySQL database for the forum. Go to manage MySQL databases. Create a new database and new user to access it.

Follow the installation forum. Open a browser to the address http://<podometry>.<domencia>.<Sonatina>/install.php. For example, if your forum is installed on a subdomain forum domain codeguru.ru then the browser will need to open the address http://forum.codeguru.ru/install.php. When you first access the forum page opens installation. Follow the instructions in the installation wizard. On the first page of the wizard, enter credentials to access the database, the name of the forum. On the second page of the installation wizard, enter the administrator credentials and password to access the database (here it is introduced for reasons of safety).

Check the operation of the installed forum. Go to an established forum by clicking on the link with the text "your newly installed forum". Verify no error messages. Go to the administration panel. Go to logs and errors. Make sure there are no errors. Then you can start creating sections of the forum.

Note

Don't ignore messages to update the engine forum in the administration panel. The update takes only a few seconds, but will significantly increase the security of the site.

Useful advice

To forum create a subdomain with name forum. Most of the forums are on subdomains with the same name (sometimes with the name of the forums). Users will intuitively go to the forum of the project without even seeing a link to it. Immediately after installation of the forum, download and install the language pack. Forum interface is displayed in Russian.

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