Forum Moderators: rogerd
I've just installed phpBB and I want to customize the forum so that the user comes in and isn't presented with a list of subforums and categories. Rather, they come in and see the list of posts on the first page.
Is this possible?
Thanks in advance,
Tim (phpbb novice)
That will make the entry point to your phpbb the viewforum page from forum 1.
If the former is the case things are a bit more tricky. You may consider a basic meta redirect or you could do an htaccess url rewrite, but this is a bit more tricky than a metatag redirect. If you don't mind sacrificing your phpbb indexpage you could simply rename it index2.php to keep it as a backup and put up a new index.php page in your phpbb root folder with code something like this:
<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH"
CONTENT="0;URL=http://yoursite.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=1"/>
</head>
</html>
That should do the trick, although I am sure there are smoother ways of doing it, such as using an htaccess rewrite condition - in your root folder htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /phpbb/index.php
RewriteRule .* /phpbb/viewforum.php?f=1
Using the above method requires that your site is on an Apache server with mod_rewrite turned on. If you want to test that you can copy this code:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
name it phpinfo.php, put it in your root folder and call it in your browser. You will get a wealth of information about your server configuration. Search the page for mod_rewrite. If you find it chances are you should be able to tell wheteher or not it is available to you.
Obviously, substitute all instances of phpbb with the name of your phpbb folder.
Hope this helps.:)
Sincerely,
Joe
The forum will be a part of the website and will be linked to from the main site. I want the forum to be incorporated into the look of the website which is fixed width, with left navigation. But that's a whole different topic.
So the idea of changing the link is excellent. Is it really that simple though? When people are taken to that link they will still see the category link at the top. But I guess it is the best and easiest option.
The only reason I want this is because I don't want the forum to have lots of categories, or even a few. The website is a new one but is similar to another community website where we changed the forum to phpbb and people didn't like it. They were used to the amateur bravenet type forums and didn't like the fact that there were so many clicks.
However I want to go with phpBB but just make it easy for the users. I'm sure it will prove a lively and active forum in due time and then we can start introducing categories.
Tim
Regards,
Tim
