Creating PhpBB forums

Hi folks,

Guess this is a question partly to Vex and Vypra; also to others who've done this before.

How does one go about creating a forum for one's website? And do you think it's worth having a forum attached to a personal site...?

In my case, my site (www.nickryan.net) is the personal site for my journalism and writing. I then have a separate blog (www.ryansrants.com) which is on Blogger, and of course a Twitter account too! I've seen other author/writers with forums attached to their own sites. I suppose if I was building a new site from scratch, I would create a menu link called 'Forum' and simply have that link to whatever PhpBB or other forum I could download. (At the moment I just update my site 'ad hoc', using Dreamweaver, but I'm not really a web designer).

So: are forums worth it? It's not as if I have massive traffic. And I might get nutters visiting too On the other hand, can it help build interest/'brand loyalty' to a writer like myself ..? Interacting with the unwashed masses?

Thoughts appreciated.

Fingers crossed Tee will see this as he's always been fairly au fait with this sort of thing

Well, Wordpress seems to be a fairly good platform for having a blog and forum linked together. Gurf is right though, Rob is more likely to be able to help you as i've never used wordpress.

Kinda depends if you want to keep your current one and just attach a forum to it (which should be easy enough). The idea is probably a good one. It seems that it would give you more scope in promoting and getting feedback on your work.

Thanks for replies so far.

Your best bet is to scroll and see who they used to host thier forums. Us crazy kids over at Zombie Death House (www.zombiedeathouse.com, for all your horror genre needs) use http://www.simplemachines.org/. Lots of leg room to play and customise your features, and unlike PHPbb this forum has a built in patching/plugin system that makes security and plugin administration much easier. Highly recommended and as free as a bag of stolen sweets.

Wordpress would also be good if you can't see many people choosing to join a forum on your site. its mind numbingly easy to set up tho you are somewhat restricted to what you can do with it. A major plus point however is that it falls under that wonderful term "open source".


It really does depend on what you want tho, if your site really needs a dedicated forum look into simple machines or any of the other sites available. If your just wanting people to to be able to comment on your articles, etc. You'd probably be better off going with something like Wordpress.


Aka'ula awayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!