Custom phpbb forum

[King_Ato]

I want a custom phpbb forum on my site that's perfectly integrated with the same header, background, etc.

Questions:
1. How long would it take the average programmer to create this?
2. How much would it cost?
3. Is it possible for a non-programmer to do this? If yes, can you link me to any tutorials/guides?

Thanks.

[edited by: eelixduppy at 5:31 am (utc) on Jan. 28, 2008]
[edit reason] no URLs, please [/edit]

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld King_Ato,

1. difficult to be exact, no clue
2. again, no clue, would depend on the time plus the rate, both things that are hard to speculate
3. probably, you would have to figure out how to edit phpbb as opposed to programming.

A non programmer might actually have better luck. I am not sure it will be exactly like the rest of your site, though it depends what you mean by exact.

[lammert]

Changing how phpBB looks is mainly changing templates and CSS, unless you want perfect integration where also menu's etc are 1:1 converted from your current site to the forum. The person how made the layout of the current site would have not much problems to adapt phpBB I guess, although I cannot give any estimates of hours needed. It depends on skills and amount of work to be done.

One thing to consider is the phpBB version and the number of add-ons you want to integrate. The software is in the middle of transistion from the 2.xx to the 3.xx version range where the 3.xx version has more funcionality, but there are also some updates to expect in the near future. Because it is new software, not all the bugs have been fixed and all the features have been added yet. Third party add-ons to phpBB (called mods) were hooked directly in the source code of phpBB in version 2.xx (I have no experience with 3.xx yet) which could make it difficult to update and apply security fixes, especially if programming experience is limited.

As you are still at the point of starting to integrate phpBB, you might think twice about the version, the add-ons and the expected work if updates are coming before putting massive reprogramming effort on the current software version to make it look like your main site.

[thecoalman]

If you know HTML and CSS the first place to start is

styles/(yourstyle)/templates/overall_header.html

and

styles/(yourstyle)/theme/common.css

Your custom header can be added to overall_header.html, only one difference here than regular HTML page which is the placeholders. For example you'll find {SITENAME} , this will be replaced with the sitename you used in the ACP by the phpbb script.

common.css contains most of the CSS for the main containers.