PHPbb

PHPbb forum friendly?

[PumpkinHead]

Hiya,

I'm thinking of starting a new project and one of my ideas is to start a website for a certain programming language. My idea is for a forum based site.

Could somebody please help on the following..

a) Is the free "phpBB" forum software search engine friendly?
b) Can you change the default font in phpBB?
c) If in the future I wanted to move towards a subscription based forum, can phpBB handle this?
d) What forum software is used by WebMasterWorld? I like the idea of entering the Meta description when you create a thread.

Thanks in advance

[eggy ricardo]

Hi

With regards to the first I am not particularly sure as i am not very well-up on SEO.

The default font can be changed faily easy by editing the CSS or downloading other styles.

As far as I know (correct me if I am wrong) PHPBB does not have subscription capabilities as an off-the-shelf feature.

WW uses its own forum system called BestBBS but as far as i know it is not publically available yet. Someone may be able to provide a link to the information about it as I can't remember where it is.

EDIT :: Heres the link:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Hope this helps
Cheers
Richard

[trillianjedi]

a) Is the free "phpBB" forum software search engine friendly?

It can be with a little work. You need mod_rewrite - search these forums for information on using that. You also need to make sure that you are not using Session ID's (use cookies instead).

b) Can you change the default font in phpBB?

It builds pages based on templates. You can change anything you want in relation to the cosmetics (full CSS layout might be tricky though!).

c) If in the future I wanted to move towards a subscription based forum, can phpBB handle this?

Yes. You can create different levels of access - you could create a new group called "paid_members" and make certain forums only accessible to members in the "paid_members" group. You would have to manually add members to that group as and when they pay up, or automate it. phpBB2 is based on MySQL, so automation (or at least semi-automation) probably wouldn't be too hard.

d) What forum software is used by WebMasterWorld? I like the idea of entering the Meta description when you create a thread.

As above post - BestBBS - not yet available and no release date.

You can make phpBB2 add meta descriptions from a database, but you'll need to get your feet wet with the code.

It's quite an easy bit of software to tailor to your own requirements - with a bit of effort you can pretty much get it to do anything.

TJ

[jasonlambert]

a) Is the free "phpBB" forum software search engine friendly?
Yes. But you have to do a little work first. Namely mod_rewrite/.htaccess (as already mentioned), a hack in append_sid() to not append session ID's to URL's for bots, and finally a hack in the header and footer php pages to replace URL's in your outputted PHP to a SE friendly format. All those things available from google ;)

b) Can you change the default font in phpBB?
Yes.

c) If in the future I wanted to move towards a subscription based forum, can phpBB handle this?
You may need to code a custom mod for it to do it properly. You may get lucky and find someone else has already written one.

[PumpkinHead]

Thanks for the replies, are there any other forum packages that are more suited to my needs?