User:Dan Nessett/Technical/Notes on Forum Software

Registration Anti-spam modification

Here is a screen shot of the registration panel with questions.

Installing forum software on CentOs 5.4

• Download webinstall.php from http://download.simplemachines.org/. Store it in ~.

• Execute:

cd /usr/local/src
sudo mkdir forum
sudo chmod 777 forum
cd forum
sudo cp ~/webinstall.php .
sudo chmod 777 webinstall.php

• Add following to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

Alias /forum/ "/usr/local/src/forum/"
<Directory "/usr/local/src/forum/">
	Options FollowSymLinks
	AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /smf "/usr/local/src/forum"

• Restart apache2 and access:

http://localhost/forum/webinstall.php

• Make sure ftp daemon is installed. If not, install vsftpd and execute:

sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd start

• Make sure mysql and php-mysql is installed. If not install it. Then execute:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start
sudo /etc/init.d/httpd graceful

• Use mysql to create the smf database:

sudo su
mysql
create database smf;
\q
exit

• Access the webinstall program from a browser:

http:/localhost/forum/webinstall.php

Follow the instructions. One thing to keep in mind. The webinstall program prompts for a username and password for localhost ftp. The user specified must have access to the directory where the webinstall.php code is stored (for these instructions /usr/local/src/forum). Otherwise, the webinstall program will display an error.

When prompted to create the forum, use the mysql username root and no password. Once the software installtion is complete, change the mysql root password to something more secure (than ).