Installing phpBB 3 on phpBB Web Hosting

phpBB3 (codenamed “Olympus”) is an open source online discussion (forum) software which is available free of charge for both personal & enterprise use with the GPL license. phpBB 3 includes a new set of features, updates to old features and security measures from the previous version of phpBB. There is a page demonstrating the changes between both on the phpBB 3 website

phpBB 3 web hosting
All of vexxhost’s affordable web hosting plans are equipped with Fantastico which allows you to use vexxhost for phpBB hosting, the advantage of our web hosting plans versus other web hosting plans is that you can install phpBB by simply locating the Fantastico button in your web hosting control panel and selecting “phpBB” on the left side of the page, the instructions are very easy and simple to follow on that page and you should be up and running within minutes.

cPanel web hosting or other web hosting

1. Make sure that your web hosting company supports phpBB
   Frequently, people go through all the other steps to be stopped at a step eventually because they forgot to make sure that their web hosting company supports the requirements of phpBB 3. It would be best to verify with your web hosting company if they support the following requirements.
2. Download the phpBB 3 software package
   You should download the phpBB 3 script by visiting the following link — phpBB 3 is available for no charge weather you are using it for personal or business usage. You should pick the “Full package” as we will be installing phpBB 3 from scratch.
3. Extract the downloaded file and upload it to your web hosting account
   Once you have downloaded the ZIP file, you should extract it on your computer using a utility, if you have Windows XP or newer, you should be able to open the ZIP file directly, if not, you can simply download a utility such as WinZIP, WinRAR and extract the archive with it. Once you have extracted the files from the ZIP file, you should upload the content of your phpBB3 directory into your website (to the directory where you’d like).
4. Create a database for phpBB 3 usage
   One of phpBB 3’s new features is a support for a wide range of database software; the most common database software used on shared web hosting services is MySQL. If you are not using cPanel for your web hosting, you should check with your control panel manual. You should login to your control panel and click on “MySQL databases”, when the page is loaded, enter the name of your new phpBB 3 database in the “new database” text box and click on the “create database” button. You should see a message that says that your database has been created. Take a note of that database name.
5. Create a database user for phpBB 3
   The following steps are for cPanel only, if you have a different control panel, you should instruct your control panel manual. While still in your control panel main page, click on “MySQL databases”. Scroll down to the “New user” section and enter a username & a password in their respective fields, take note of that username and password as you’ll need them later and press the “Create user” button, you should get a message that confirms it by says the username was created successfully.
6. Give permissions to the created user to the database
   The following steps are for cPanel only, if you have a different control panel, you should instruct your control panel manual. While still in your control panel main page, click on “MySQL databases”. Go to the “Add user to database” section and select the user that you have created in step 5 and select the database that you have created in step 4 and press the “submit” button, you should get a page with all the MySQL privilages, you should select the “ALL PRIVILEGES” which should automatically select all of the other checkboxes, after doing that, click on “Make Changes” to commit the database assignment and you should get a confirmation that the user has been assigned to the database.
7. Complete the phpBB 3 installation
   To complete the installation, you should visit your website to the directory where you uploaded your phpBB 3 files at and the installation wizard provided by phpBB 3 should be there, the rest of the installation process should be seamless from there when you will be asked to enter database information, you should select “MySQL” and enter the username/password/database name that you noted earlier, you might also need to change the CHMOD some directories so that should be done using FTP.
8. Delete the install directory
   Once you’re done installing everything and your forum is done and ready, you should delete the “install” directory as it is a big potential security risk that isn’t worth taking.

Wordpress Hosting: Upgrading to WordPress 2.5

With the release of the new WordPress 2.5, there are a lot of new WordPress users however there are a big base of people who would like to use the capabilities and the new features of WordPress 2.5 however they are unable to because they fear breaking something however an upgrade can be done seamlessly without involving any risk at all, in case anything goes wrong, it can be fixed in a couple of minutes and everything would be back to normal on the old version. There are two methods of upgrading depending on the type of web host you have.

VEXXHOST WordPress hosting
All of our web hosting plans come with Fantastico which enables you to install/upgrade/uninstall over 52 scripts, instead of going through this document and following the instructions, Fantastico will simply tell you that you need to upgrade your script, all you need is to click on upgrade and Fantastico will backup your old version, upgrade your WordPress install and upgrade your account.

Other web hosting platforms

• Download the new version of WordPress from http://wordpress.org/download/.
• Backup your database, you should do this, most of the time people are lazy and do not do this however considering this is a major upgrade, it’s a big risk to take, I would strongly recommend backing up your database, that can be done by logging into your web hosting control panel and using a utility such as phpMyAdmin to take a dump of the MySQL database so that you can restore it incase anything goes wrong.
• Backup your files, now this will be important so just in case everything goes wrong, we’ll put back the old set of files and the old database so everything will be back just like the way it was on the first place and so that you can get the least downtime possible. This cannot be skipped else you’re taking a very big risk and the work it takes to back it up will be a lot less than having to eventually re-install everything from scratch. I suggest downloading it to a directory on your computer
• Update all your plug-ins and de-activate all of them so that you can make sure that when upgrading, the plug-in will not cause any unexpected problems by new modifications to the code rendering your website unusable, your best option would be to deactivate them so that you will face less problems when performing the upgrade on your WordPress blog, this is very key step when upgrading as it might just break your new install.
• You should go into the directory where you have extracted the new WordPress 2.5 install and go to your directory where you have your old backup, copy over the contents inside wp-content/themes however not including the “default”, copy over wp-content/uploads and the wp-content/plugins directory however make sure you do not copy the “akismet” or “hello.php” files from the old installation as these have been updated and are now obsolete.
• Once you’re done with that, upload everything back and over-write everything as you should have a backup of your old website if you properly followed the steps as there is no risk over-writing.
• Run the upgrade script by going to your site, it is located in the wp-admin/upgrade.php so you would have to go http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php depending on your website, follow the instructions that have been given to you by the script to upgrade your WordPress installation
• Reactive the plugins by logging into the control panel and your WordPress upgrade should be complete by now, make a new backup of the new database just in case!

Installing WordPress 2.5 on WordPress hosting

Wordpress is one of the class leading blogs and the one of the most used from personal to enterprise size blogs, proved stability by hosting popular blogs for even automotive manufacturers, most of the people enjoy the facility of the administrator control panel however the installation process behind it is slighty complicated however it depends on what type of hosting do you have.

VEXXHOST WordPress hosting
All of our plans include Fantastico, so instead of going through this whole document in the pain of installing WordPress it, all you need to do is enter Fantastico from your control panel in cPanel, click on “WordPress”, insert the path you want it installed, the username and password for the administrator panel and you’re ready and good to go

Other web hosting platforms

• Head to the WordPress website page http://wordpress.org/download/ and click on “Download”, it should download a zip file that you will place somewhere on your hard disk and unzip it, you’ll have a bunch of folders and files starting with wp
• Upload the extracted folderto your account, you should usually check with your provider’s control panel as there are different ways to login via FTP, we cannot go in detail about every single control panel out there however asking your support staff should help you. A free and good FTP client is SmartFTP at http://smartftp.com
• Create a new clean MySQL database, again this is something that is control panel specific, the procedure is very different from control panel to control panel however in cPanel, it is the easiest to be done using a Wizard, more information and a video tutorial is included here, http://www.cpanel.net/media/tutorials/mysqlwizard.htm — Make sure you get a MySQL username, password and database name to continue our installation.
• Rename the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and replace the fields for it to appear something like the following
  define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
  Most of the time, you will not need to modify your DB_HOST unless your hosts tell you too, after uploading the renamed wp-config.php file into the main root directory of your hosting, simply go to http://yourdomain.com/dir/wp-admin/install.php where dir is the directory you uploaded WordPress to, if you uploaded it to the root directory of your account, then simply go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php and following the instructions.

That’s basically it for installing WordPress on your web hosting, as you can see the method is a lot easier when using Fantastico with our affordable web hosting platform, happy blogging!

Blog scripts hosting comparison: WordPress vs. b2evolution vs. MovableType

In the web hosting industry, there are a lot more blog scripts than you could compare however we have attempted to pick the most used, popular and properly taken care of. Due to the ease of creating a blog scripts, there are literally thousands of them everywhere as most of the time, new PHP developers create a blog for their first script.

We have reviewed here the top 3 most used blogs, the industry-leading WordPress at the moment, b2evolution, a famous alternative that can both be a photo gallery & a content management system and MovableType, another very professional blog script which is very useful of news-related blog sites because it has a very powerful editor and its expandability.

Wordpress

b2\cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to WordPress. b2\cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 blogs as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Though WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.
WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package was changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked and continuing growth in WordPress’s popularity.

User friendliness: 5

WordPress is pretty much unmatchable in its user friendliness, an eight year old would be able to configure it and start posting his own posts, first of all the hosting and installation procedure is very simple and it’s the famously called “2 minute install”, also if you are not very familiar most of the cPanel web hosting companies offer WordPress hosting or quick install using Fantastico within a few minutes. After installing, the administrator control panel is a perfectly sculpted two-tier navigation that’s right to the point, you just know where everything is supposed to be, WordPress has really exceeded the limits of being user friendly without being too bloaty, also the new 2.5 administrator theme is certainly impressing.

Security: 3

While security is still something in the works of the WordPress factory, there has been a research that there was actually 98% of the WordPress installs are actually vulnerable due to plugins, the API to create plugins is very simple which means everyone makes their plugins but most of the developers make the mistakes and become vulnerable to all type of security problems. WordPress 2.0 has been released in December 2005, so in around 3 years, WordPress had around 30 serious vulnerabilities however due to the fact that there are so many plugins around, the chances of decreasing your site security is more when using more plugins.

Reliablity: 4.5

Most of the very popular blogs are hosted using WordPress, they are usually running a heavily modified version to prevent any security risks and also because of their custom needs, GM has a few sites that are powered by WordPress and no one would be able to identify them as a site powered by WordPress as there are pretty much no signs left of WordPress, however due to the increase of the expandability, a lot of sites opt to create their own “fork” of WordPress and forget any other versions.

b2evolution

b2evolution is a multi-lingual, multi-user, multi-blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License and is available without charge. François Planque forked b2evolution from version 0.6.1 of b2\cafelog in 2003. Another popular fork of b2 is WordPress.

b2evolution is focused on ease of installation and feature richness. It can easily be installed on almost any LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) host in a matter of minutes. With the latest release, no configuration file editing is necessary, as all configuration is handled through the installer or administrative back-end.

User friendliness: 3.5

B2evolution blog has attempted to be very user friendly however again this isn’t something that is a strong point of itself, in the section of multi-blog multi-user, it certainly has a huge advantage as it has been primarily made for that purpose, also, the user interface looks however kind of outdated and certainly could use a facelift, everything seems to be in so close and looks very cluttered, the backend could use a lot of work to make it look better and more proper and acceptable.

Security: 5

Again, security comes higher than usability here, in its history, b2evolution had only had 6 security issues which gives it top marks in security, there isn’t anything at all that can be added as the way it has been coded was that any plug-in that are made could or might be made by a new coder which could make any SQL injection mistakes, doing that might have decreased the expandability and everything else in general however with that limitations there is the very noticeable security increase.

Reliablity: 3.5

The reliability of b2evolution is not yet proved that much, considering that we don’t see that much of sites that use it at the moment, WordPress and other blog scripts have taken over the blog market in a very superior way, also hosted blog websites such as the ones provided by WordPress their selves and such as Google’s Blogger seriously handicap the ability of b2evolution to be a valid competitor in this market, while there are a few sites that are still using it, however most of the sites have stopped using it.

MovableType

Movable Type was originally named “Serge” after musician Serge Gainsbourg. The TrackBack feature was introduced in version 2.2, and has since been adopted by a number of other blog systems.

With the release of version 3.0, there were marked changes in Movable Type’s licensing, most notably placing greater restrictions on its use without paying a licensing fee. This sparked criticism from some users of the software. With the release of Movable Type 3.2, the ability to create an unlimited number of weblogs at all licensing levels was restored. In Movable Type 3.3, it is completely free for personal users.

Six Apart released Movable Type 4 beta on June 5, 2007 and re-launched movabletype.org as a community site for purposes of developing an open-source version that was released under GPL on December 12, 2007. Movable Type Enterprise version provides advanced features such as LDAP management, enterprise database integration such as Oracle, MySQL, user roles, blog cloning and automated blog provisioning. It is also available as part of Intel’s SuiteTwo professional software offering of Web 2.0 tools.

User friendliness: 5

MovableType have came up with a revolutionary control panel to manage your blog, using the same control panel, you are actually able to manage multiple blogs by identifying them by the domain name and it uses a two tier navigation system with drop-down menus so that it actually looks exactly like a user interface of a specific application or whatsoever. It certainly looks very impressing and very modern, it also looks very professional.

Security: 4.5

MovableType has a very secure history, only 4 total security advisories which is certainly a very impressive number considering on how it popular it is, however a main reason why is because previously in the 3.X versions, it was commercialized which meant that it had to be perfectly secure code so that you would be able to sell it, starting 4.X, the MovableType script is completely open-source and since then the participation and the popularity of the script has increased majorly.

Reliablity: 3

MovableType is a very good alternative however because it was previously commercialized, people still have the image that it is actually still paid software so they don’t take it as a valid option when picking their next script for their blog, now that it is an open-source software, it’s starting to have a big advantage over others as it was commercialized professional software before, this should eventually make up for a great application eventually.

To sum up this comparison, MovableType is a great option for the future as WordPress has a big competitor at the moment that no one knows about however b2evolution is still there for the multi-user multi-blog market as they have always led that part of the blog hosting industry. There seems to be a very promising future in the blog scripts with MovableType going from commercial t open-source.

Free open-source forums showdown: phpBB vs SMF vs MyBB

A lot of web hosting users are confused when they are trying to create their first community on which forum script to pick for their community as changing options down the line isn’t something that is preferred or can be easily done.

We are going to compare all 3 most popular scripts on a few points such as their user friendliness, security and reliability, these are the most important points when picking your forum script, however just because one of the contenders win doesn’t make it the best script out there, the needs of each person is different however we’re only comparing them in the case of general audience.

phpBB

phpBB was first created by James Atkinson (theFinn) in June 2000 as a UBB-like forum solution for his wife. Once released to the public through SourceForge, it gained popularity very quickly, and by December of the same year v1.0.0 was released. Two additional major releases, 1.2 and 1.4, were made in February and April of 2001. During this time, the development team expanded to include Bart van Bragt (BartVB) and Paul S. Owen (psoTFX). Work on phpBB 2.0.x began in February of 2001. phpBB2 was built entirely from scratch, and took an entire year to complete.

Finally, in April of 2002, phpBB 2.0.0 was made available to the public. The 2.0.x line of phpBB has since risen to become the most successful opensource bulletin board software worldwide. Work on phpBB 2.2 was started almost immediately and continued over the following years. On January 14, 2005, it was announced that phpBB 2.2 would be no more. Due to the large scale changes made to the codebase and the lack of backwards compatibility with phpBB 2.0.x., it was decided that the next version of phpBB would have to be 3.0.0, as is required under the Linux Kernel numbering system. Thus, phpBB3 “Olympus” was born.

User friendliness: 4.5

phpBB can be installed using Fantastico on most web hosting providers automatically with a couple of clicks which is a big plus for user friendliness and also the new subSilver theme that is included with phpBB 3 certainly looks very impressive and a lot more professional compared to the previous one included in phpBB 2, the administrative side has got a facelift which makes it look a lot better with better usability, while administrative control panels have always had design flaws on how to distribute data well through pages, phpBB certainly came up with good ways to bypass that. Also, it has been made more as a plug and play forum starting phpBB 3 compared to the previous hours of configuration spent to configure and find a decent theme for it.

Security: 4

Security is a pretty strong point for phpBB considering that for the previous 7 years, phpBB 2 had 38 security advisories, around 5 per year might be a high number but at the number of users that use it, it is very low. However the phpBB 3 seems to be going very strong, since its launch date which was 13th of December 2007 till now, which is around 6-7 months, and it has only had 1 security advisory which makes it very secure compared to other forum scripts around.

Reliability: 5

phpBB runs the world’s biggest online forum at the moment which is the Gaia online forum, it has 1,334,740,294 posts and over 12,589,038 members, these numbers are very big, the second biggest phpBB forum which is a Brazilian games forum has over 102,704,207 posts and 167,802 – The difference is huge but millions of posts and all these popular forums running phpBB with no problem is certainly very impressive and gives phpBB top marks for its reliability

Overall score: 14/15

The final score for phpBB is very high and it’s not surprising considering according to a small Google check, it is currently hosting over 6,680,000 forums and a big reason why is because of it’s popularity and how it’s very secure and reliable.

SMF

SMF was created to replace the forum software YaBB SE, which at the time was gaining a bad reputation because of problems with its Perl-based equivalent and similarly named software YaBB. YaBB was known to cause resource allocation problems and was resource heavy on many systems, in its earlier versions. YaBB SE was written as a rough PHP port of YaBB, but tended to have many of the same resource and even security problems since it was a port of the insecure Perl version. Joseph Fung and Jeff Lewis of Lewis Media Inc., the owners of YaBB SE and the original owners of SMF, made the decision to convert to a new brand and name.

SMF started as a small project by one of the YaBB SE developers and its main intent was to add more advanced templating to YaBB SE. The project then slowly grew to address common feature requests, efficiency problems, and security concerns. A rehaul of YaBB SE had been in development for several years, but was superseded by this then competing project. Popular interest in the new YaBB SE fork sparked a complete rewrite of the code, with security and performance in mind. This eventually became today’s Simple Machines Forum. The first SMF release was SMF 1.0 Beta 1a, released on 30 September 2003 to Charter Members only.

On the 23rd of October 2006, Simple Machines LLC was registered in the state of Arizona, and the transfer of copyrights from Lewis Media to Simple Machines LLC was completed on the 24th of November 2006 during a three-day retreat in Tucson, AZ. This was done for the “[solidification of] the team’s commitment to continuously providing free software, without the perceived risks of corporate influence”

User friendliness: 3.5

From all 3 forums, SMF doesn’t get a lot of credit for its user friendliness; the user interface that it comes with is very old and looks very outdated, it has been the same for quite a few years now with no face lift at all. The administrator panel is a lot more crowded/harder to understand than other scripts, the initial score for user friendliness was 3 however one neat feature that is given for is the web install, to sum it up, instead of having to download, uncompress, upload, install, you download one PHP file that does all of that, it’s very suitable and helpful however the UI still needs a lot more work for it to be on par. A plus because it can be automatically installed using Fantastico with a couple of clicks.

Security: 5

SMF might not take the pie at user friendliness but it steals it at security, for the past 4 years, it has only had 7 security advisories which means around 2 per year which is a big difference compared to the other forums, the elements and the main code is very secure which makes it a very good forum on the backend, however because it is not often updated, not having a lot of security advisories isn’t a surprise for a stable untouched product.

Reliability: 4

SMF isn’t popular amongst big forums, the biggest forum at the moment that is hosted by SMF has 4,358,549 posts and 30, 795 – While it is not very popular however it is secure which is why it’s reliability marks are a bit high, also it has a good implementation with Joomla which makes it one of the more popular choices for Joomla users, it is also being used on the Joomla support forum.

Overall score: 12.5/15

The overall score for SMF is expected; it has a lot of work to be done on feature-wise however it is very impressive on its security part and could be very well a future reliable forum script. It would be very useful to have it for a public forum with minimal features but maximum security.

MyBB

MyBB’s roots lie in the discussion boards XMB and DevBB — Years ago, Chris Boulton, web34rk and b0ndman started developing XMB. After some time, web34rk and b0ndman left the team and Chris became lead developer of a team with two other developers. Over time, staff shifted again and several developers didn’t like the way things were heading. Together, they forked XMB and created DevBB. DevBB was the predecessor to MyBB, a temporary solution for people to use whilst MyBB was being developed. Development teams changed frequently, but MyBB is still here with Chris Boulton as lead developer since 2002.

User friendliness: 4.5

The user friendliness of MyBB is very good, considering that it is a new player in the free forums game however it has been evolving fast and taking over the forums market quickly because of its very simple down-to-earth setup and configuration, it facilitates management of your forum by making everything a lot simpler but at the same time still having the capacities of advanced management such as provided in other good scripts or even good paid forum scripts. A small minus is that it is not automatically installable on web hosts using Fantastico.

Security: 3.5

The security is a major issue with MyBB, it is generally secure however it needs a lot more work, considering that it had 34 security advisories in the past 4 years which means around 9 security advisories per year, that is very high however it is still a new script and it has a lot of work to go into it, the more work that is done on it, the more it should be stable in the future, I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial versions of other forums would have as much exploits as this, however MyBB has a history of quickly addressing security issues and letting their clients know.

Reliability: 4

MyBB is very reliable because of how quick it is updated and is slowly starting to be adapted by big forums, one of the big forums that is ran by MyBB has over 3 million posts and 30 thousand members, a forum dedicated to NCAA (college sports). Another couple of forums with 100K posts are coming up soon, also the upcoming versions of MyBB have support for clustered MySQL database setups which gives them a big advantage for hosting big forums.

Overall score: 12/15

MyBB is still a work in progress and the release of their new upcoming 1.4 version might change a lot and should change a lot however the current status is very good and this project seems to be heading to the right track and following the tracks of other popular scripts.

Conclusion

To conclude, our winner is phpBB which is by far the best for the current time, it has been working forever for the past years with no problems and the release of phpBB 3 separates it from the competition by far however MyBB is upcoming well with their 1.4 release and SMF are still focusing on the very secure forum script.