PHPbb - Is it an easy learn?

[karnesb]

Hi all,

Is PHPbb a quick study or does it require a longer labor or love to do well?

My hosting provider, AWeber, provides a PHPbb for free as an add on to my sites if I want to take advantage of it. I currently use DiscussionApps from server.com, find it works fine, and am happy with how easy it was to set it up to match my site. Still, I would like to offer a bit of flexibility to my visitors, so I took a look at PHP's bulliten board module and realized it wasn't so much a program as a new language I'd need to learn in order to fully utilize.

I taught myself html, a bit of flash and java too over the last 1.5 years and I must confess I'm pretty darn good at development. As such, I know the time it can take to get past the learning curve and am not sure I can commit to a large project like that right now. A lot of the set up is easy front end stuff, but the challenge for me would be to make it visually parellel my site design. For that I beg your advice...

How difficult would it be, and specifically - how much time might I count on investing if I tried to set up a PHPbb? Experts, please advise.

Thanks. :-)

[PeOfEo]

The PHPbb group makes forum's and other stuff premade, I didn't think there was any editing involved besides colors. Are you talking about the PHPbb group?

[Damien]

First, you can configure the board completly from the admin web interface of PHPbb. There are also lots of skins and designs which can be downloaded from the PHPbb site, all of these can be configured from the web interface.

If you want to edit, lets say for example, the terms and conditions page then you must edit the PHP file containing that information. In this particular example;
phpbb >> language >> lang_english >> lang_main.php
edit the information and re upload that page.

The same would apply for anything you are changing on the board with the exception of changes made through the web interface. However, you could run the board without any knowledge of PHP, but it's a good place to start learning