Phorum

1. Requirements 2. Quickstart guide 3. Detailed installation instructions 3.1 Download Phorum 3.2 Unpack the downloaded archive 3.3 Place the Phorum files in your website's document root 3.4 Create a database and a database user 3.5 Configure the database access 3.6 Run the web based installer 3.7 Things to do after installing Phorum 4. Additional issues 4.1 Additional issues for UNIX (Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.) 4.1.2 Cache directory 4.2 Additional issues for Windows 4.2.1 Cache directory 4.2.2 Problems sending mail to end-users 4.2.3 Date formatting 5. Support Phorum has been modernized to run on current PHP releases and requires PHP 8.2 or higher. MySQL has discontinued active development for all version below 5.0. The Phorum teams uses 5.0 for all development. MySQL 5.0.15 was the first production release of the 5.0 branch. Since the first release of Phorum 5.2 we were only testing against MySQL-5 but weren explicitly using MySQL-4 incompatible queries. As of Phorum 5.2.14 there were changes needed to make Phorum work with more recent MySQL versions and therefore MySQL-5 or higher is a requirement now. If you do not run your own website, but have hosted your website with a hosting provider, then please ask your hosting provider if your account meets these requirements. This is the quickstart guide for installing Phorum, aimed at people that are used to working with websites, PHP and databases. If you are having problems following this guide, then please read chapter 3 instead. 1. Unpack Phorum into a directory below your website's document root; 2. Create a database and a full-access database user for that database; 3. Edit include/config/database.php.sample, save it as include/config/database.php; 4. Open {phorum url}/admin.php in your web browser and finish the install. If you have downloaded the .zip file, you can extract the files from that archive directly using Windows XP's zipfile support. If you downloaded the .tar.gz file, you will have to download an appropriate tool for unpacking, e.g. WinZip ( If you have access to a UNIX shell, you can unpack the .tar.gz archive using the following command: The document root for a website is the directory in which your site's web pages are stored. If your website's URL is " and you place the Phorum files in a directory called "forum" inside your document root, your Phorum installation will be available at the URL " From now on, we will name this URL simply {phorum url}. So if you see {phorum url}/admin.php, using the example we mean If the webserver is running on the same system as where you have unpacked the downloaded archive, you can move the unpacked files to your website's document root. If the webserver is running on another system, you will have to upload the files to your website's document root. In most cases, you will use FTP for this, but some hosting providers require SCP (secure copy, which is more secure than FTP). If you do not know how or where to upload the Phorum files, please contact your hosting provider. Security note: (simply ignore this if it does not make sense to you) There are software packages that require you to make files writable for the webserver (using the infamous "chmod 777"). DO NOT DO THIS FOR ANY OF THE PHORUM FILES. The webserver only needs read access on the distribution files, because all dynamic data is stored in the database. If you run into problems running Phorum, it will never be because you "forgot" to do "chmod 777" on any the Phorum files. If you have hosted your site with a hosting provider, then ask your hosting provider to setup the database and a full access database user for you. If you run your own database server, then you will have to create the database and the user yourself. If you are using a control panel, like phpmyadmin, then use that control panel to create them. Else, you can use the mysql prompt to create the database by issuing commands like: mysql CREATE DATABASE phorum; mysql GRANT ALL ON phorum.