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CHAPTER 7 INTRODUCING PHPBB 221 make an honest attempt to resolve the issues. Make them feel at home in your community. It s a good idea to welcome them aboard, as this creates a personal rapport. Always act in a professional manner, and remember that you only get one chance to make a first impression. Your users ultimately define the difference between a successful message board and a miserable failure if you keep that in mind, and act accordingly, you ll have done well for yourself. Keeping Things Familiar You would do very well to make sure your forums visually resemble the rest of your site. Ideally, you will be able to create a template that closely matches the design of the rest of your site, create forums whose topics closely reflect whatever services or products your site may deliver, and apply it to your community. Keeping continuity between the two areas of your site not only will help your users feel right at home, but could also have the added effect of further visits to your site s main content, which can only help. Continuity is a must for professionalism on your site. Leaving the default theme will not necessarily make your site stand out and be appealing. Keeping Things Fresh At the very least, it s critical that you keep your forum software current. If you don t, you open yourself up to security problems and a nightmare that no forum administrator wants to experience: a board hijacking. Additionally, introducing new features via modifications (also known as mods or hacks) every once in a while is a smart idea. You could also add new smilies from time to time to appease your users. People love new stuff, and it keeps them coming back every time. Using a Quality Script Finally, it s important that the forum script you choose is of high quality. Forum scripts that are buggy detract from the users experience. Make sure your script is easily maintained and upgraded to help facilitate running a well-patched and secure board, and make sure your script has a large support network in case something goes wrong. Lucky for you, I ve made this search easy, as I m covering such a script in this part. Enter phpBB The first version of phpBB grew out of the need for a PHP-based message board script that visually resembled the gold standard of message boards in 2000, Infopop s Ultimate Bulletin Board. The board caught on with users as a simple, easily run script, and the rest is history. Since those humble beginnings, phpBB s popularity has grown tremendously, with a vast online community of developers, gurus, and code hackers. It s been translated into over 25 languages, and had over a thousand modifications and templates coded for it. People have coded entire content management systems around it, showing how popular phpBB is with the online community. Figure 7-1 illustrates a default installation of phpBB 2.0.
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220 CHAPTER 7 INTRODUCING PHPBB Administrator: This person controls all aspects of the message boards, including the forum software and possibly even the underlying server hardware. Moderator: A user the administrator entrusts with running the day-to-day operations of a specific forum. Moderators may be experts in the field their forum may cover, for example. Super moderator: A user the administrator designates who can moderate all of the forums on the message board. Some administrators choose to make all their moderators super moderators, while others give this title to possibly one other person. Signature/ Sig : Users can optionally affix a signature to each of their posts, which may contain a quote, an image known as a tag, or pretty much anything else they want. Hack: Also known as a modification (or simply mod), hacks are not as bad as they may sound. Hacks generally add new features to the board. This old-hat terminology lives on despite the mainstream media s confusion of hackers with crackers, which are criminals. Don t get the two confused. A phpBB hacker generally implements lots of new features for the board software and releases them to the public. Script kiddie: Script kiddies are crackers that exploit and deface web sites and message boards for fun and bragging rights. Sometimes, script kiddies can cause lots of damage. As a message board administrator, you should secure your board as if you are under constant threat from script kiddies and other, more sophisticated, threats, because you are. Troll: A user generally intent on causing havoc on your board. Trolls like to start arguments or generally act disrespectful to everyone. They have existed on the Internet (and in real life, for that matter!) since the beginning of time. Get used to them! You ll see more than your share while you administer a message board. Bot: Bots are a relatively new phenomenon in the fight for message board security; the typical bot registers new accounts on message boards automatically in order to boost their search engine rankings. Some bots are sophisticated enough to spam certain types of message boards. If you enable the proper validation in phpBB, you won t have to deal with these. (I ll cover defense against bots at length in Chapter 10.) Organizing Your Forums Logically Time is money, and you will need to put a lot of time into your message board to make it worth your while and be something special. Generally, you need to pay very close attention to how you decide to organize your forums. Keep your forums in line with the main content of the rest of your web site. People are on your site because they are interested in what your site has to say on a particular topic, and having a forum for their discourse will be a boon to your traffic (and repeat traffic). It s a good idea to make a map of your site s content (if you don t have one already) and model your forums and categories against that map. Respecting Your Bread and Butter: Your User Base It s very important that you visit your forum frequently to keep up with what is going on. Abandoning your board is the worst thing for it. People feel comfortable seeing their fearless leader stick around their board, so they don t feel left out in the cold. If your members report problems,
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Introducing phpBB CHAPTER 7 If you look at the web sites that attract immense traffic consistently, you ll find that their respective webmasters have implemented a message board of some kind to augment the content they serve. These days, it s surprising to run into a web site that doesn t host forums of some kind! Forums are an easy and popular way to implement a community on your site. Properly run, forums can reap considerable rewards in terms of first-time visitors and, most importantly, repeat traffic. Running a forum on your web site can be a very engaging experience, with the opportunity to collaborate with people all over the world right on your site; best of all, you can do it for free with an immensely popular Open Source forum script known as phpBB. This chapter will discuss common terminology used in the world of message board administration, a few important habits to pick up to help drive your community to success, items to take into consideration when choosing the software your message board should run on, and an overview of why you should use phpBB as your forum solution. The Basics of Running Your Own Forums To make your message board venture succeed, you ll want to have a grasp of the important concepts of successful message board administration. Some Forum Administration Lingo Message boards, like anything else, come with their own brand of lingo. I ll take you through some of the more common terminology that you ll encounter in the world of forum administration. If you re experienced with message boards, feel free to skip this section (or skim it for fun). If not, these are some good terms for you to get acquainted with, as you ll undoubtedly be exposed to them. Forum: An organizational area for posts on your message board with a common theme. Archive: A special type of read-only forum that holds old posts generally deemed worthy of keeping around by a moderator. Category: A group of forums that (ideally!) share a common theme, typically displayed on the front page of a message board. Topic/Thread: A string of related posts that live in a forum.
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CHAPTER 6 MAINTAINING YOUR SITE 215 what he or she has posted. A long-term sense of identity on a site is critical for the individuals to stay motivated to come back and participate. Drupal, which has focused on community building since its inception, gives you the tools to shape your community the way you want it. While you can think about Drupal in terms of its usefulness as a content management system, or its practicality as a publishing platform, or its suitability as a web application framework, the most Drupal-like question to ask might be, What kind of online community do I want to create?
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214 CHAPTER 6 MAINTAINING YOUR SITE The Drupal Community Building a successful online community is a challenge. How do you know when you ve succeeded? Statistics from your server logs won t tell you plenty of sites on the Internet get thousands of visits a day but couldn t be considered communities. Likewise, you can t measure your community based on how many posts or comments are on a site. I ve visited many sites and left comments, never to return and read another article or see if someone has replied to my comment. And there you have the first clues as to what makes a successful online community: can you participate in some way? Do you want to come back? Are you interested in seeing how others in the community react to what you ve said or done? Are you interested in what the others in the community are doing? The vibrant and growing Drupal community is one that spills over the confines of Drupal.org. There is no doubt that Drupal.org plays a central and crucial role in forming and defining the Drupal community, but there is so much more to it than that. Several other sites focus exclusively on Drupal s software (http://www.bryght.com, http://www.civicspace. labs.org, and http://www.civicactions.com), and these must be included in any definition of the Drupal community. In fact, anyone who writes on the Web about Drupal becomes part of the community via aggregator sites like Technorati and Planet Drupal. When people write about Drupal on the Web, and especially if they allow visitors to leave comments on their site, they are initiating a conversation. It is common for people, having found a blog post about Drupal, to leave comments on the blog engaging the blog owner, perhaps answering questions, providing guidance, sharing resources, and so on. This type of web-based dialogue highlights the attractive power of the community, as well as the effectiveness of tools such as feed aggregation. What are the functional elements of the Drupal community? There is a central place (Drupal.org), a cause (great software), a community awareness (the aggregated writings about Drupal from around the Web), and motivated individuals who believe in the cause. The Drupal community is not just virtual. The people who identify themselves most strongly with the Drupal community organize and attend real-life events. Whether at conferences, user groups, or ad hoc meetings, members of the Drupal community often take the opportunity to get together. When they do, they usually share their experiences online with the community using Drupal.org, thus bridging the gap between the virtual and the real- world aspects of the community. This would suggest that online communities benefit when the tools are available for organizing real-world events. This includes calendars for dates and times, private messages for working out details, and a way for everyone to be involved by adding to a web site and sharing their ideas. This can be seen in other online communities as well. For example, Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/) is very much about making real- world contacts happen. Communities reward members who make positive contributions and discourage abusers. This seems to happen naturally due to human nature, but successful online communities give the humans tools to express their nature. The reward of having other community members appreciate your posts and respond to your comments seems to be great enough to motivate people to keep coming back and become more and more involved in the community. A community preserves an identity. Drupal rewards its developers by tracking how many CVS commits they ve made, or by letting people announce what roles they ve played in developing or supporting Drupal. You can also monitor a particular member and closely follow
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CHAPTER 6 MAINTAINING YOUR SITE 213 the Drupal.org web site is put together, or how to best document the Drupal software, join the infrastructure or documentation lists. If you want to participate in a discussion on how to program Drupal and see the latest discussions about where the Drupal code- base is going, the development list is for you. Each mailing list also has an archive that you can search to catch up on previous discussions or find answers to your questions. DrupalDocs: If you are keen on learning how to program Drupal modules or customize Drupal code, you ll be interested in exploring DrupalDocs (http://drupaldocs.org/). That is where the Drupal API references are kept, showing you all of Drupal s functions and explaining how to use them. The documentation also includes excellent discussions and articles that describe the way the code is put together, explore the various subsystems such as the database abstraction layer and the menu system, and give plenty of code examples to help you write your own custom modules. (See http://drupaldocs.org/ api/head/group.) CVS repositories: All Drupal code is kept in revision control with CVS. If you have a CVS client, you can check out the code directly from CVS (http://drupal.org/node/320). Furthermore, the repositories are displayed online as web pages (http://cvs.drupal.org/ viewcvs/drupal/), meaning you can browse through the many files that make up Drupal, see how they ve evolved in time, and check when the latest changes were made. If you are a programmer and have written a Drupal module or theme that you want to share with the community, you can apply for commit access to the contributions repository (http:// drupal.org/cvs-account). Make sure to describe in detail what you wish to contribute; expressing your intentions clearly, or perhaps pointing to a demonstration of the code you want to commit, will speed the process of getting your CVS account. Note One of my personal favorite pages on the Drupal.org site is the history of CVS commits (http://drupal.org/cvs). To some of us, seeing what code is being worked on and how Drupal is evolving is daily reading. IRC: Many of the most active members of the Drupal community can be found on one of the IRC channels dedicated to Drupal at Freenode.net (http://freenode.net/). Join either the #drupal-support (for help with using and administering Drupal) or the #drupal (for development) channels to meet with Drupal experts and enthusiasts for real-time chatting. Planet Drupal: A great way to stay on top of what is happening in the Drupal world is to visit the Planet Drupal page (http://drupal.org/planet). Planet Drupal is a special collection of feeds aggregated from the personal blogs of many individuals who are active in the Drupal community.
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212 CHAPTER 6 MAINTAINING YOUR SITE Maintain Your Updated Site Now that you have updated your site, don t forget to plan for the future: make a backup of your database and your file system, write to your log what changes you ve made (or check the new version into your version control software), and use the backup to set up a test site! Getting Drupal Support Documentation isn t worth anything if you don t know where to find it, and sometimes all the documentation in the world isn t as useful as being able to ask someone for advice. Knowing where to look and whom to ask will greatly enhance your success and enjoyment as a Drupal site administrator. Not surprisingly, the main resource for Drupal documentation and help is Drupal.org. Here is a quick tour of the most important resources to be found there. Projects: Keeping up with the latest releases and browsing the various offerings for modules and themes is fun and informative. Projects include the Drupal project itself, contributed modules, contributed themes, and translations. Each of these subprojects can be browsed by the Drupal version you re interested in (4.6, 4.7, cvs, and so forth). You can see the entire range of offerings on the Projects page at Drupal.org(http://drupal.org/project). Bugs, issues and feature requests: Did you find something wrong with Drupal or a contributed module? Do you have a great idea for how a component can be improved? Perhaps there is a feature you are missing? For these cases, please file an issue (http:// drupal.org/node/add/project_issue). Make sure to specify the component and version to which it applies, as well as how you found the problem to begin with. This is also the proper way to submit patches to existing code. Forums: The forums on Drupal.org (http://drupal.org/forum) are the main place to turn when you want to ask how-to questions, assess whether Drupal is right for you, or present your newly created Drupal-powered site. The forums are also a great place to look for opportunities to use your Drupal wisdom to answer questions for others who might be just starting out. The forums form the backbone of the Drupal user community. Drupal handbooks: The Drupal handbooks (http://drupal.org/handbooks) are the official documentation for the project. They are written and contributed by normal users who have taken the time to learn about Drupal and write about their experiences for the benefit of others. Because the text is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike2.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/), you are free to make copies of the work and use it in a very flexible manner. Drupal aids you in this by offering several export features, including printer-friendly, DocBook XML, and OPML views. If you want to contribute to the documentation, all you need is a Drupal user account. Mailing lists: Several Drupal-related mailing lists are available (http://drupal.org/ mailing-lists), ranging from a monthly newsletter to focused discussions on support, documentation, infrastructure, and development. If you need help, join the support list. Volunteers from the community try to keep up with everyone who needs help getting Drupal going, and your expert voice is always welcome. If you want to discuss the way
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CHAPTER 6 MAINTAINING YOUR SITE 211 Figure 6-4. The Drupal update screen Test Your Site After running the update.php script, you should test your site (with the contributed modules still turned off) and confirm that things are alright. If you find any bugs or issues at this point, it is better to address them before getting to the business of updating the contributed modules, as everything is dependent on the core system. Update Contributed Modules Once the Drupal core is up and running, it is time to update the contributed modules. Make sure you download the version of the modules that corresponds to your new, updated Drupal installation. For each module, look for README.txt, UPDATE.txt, and INSTALL.txtfiles to address how to go about updating to the current version. The difficulty here is that it is up to the module s author(s) and the community at large to provide the information and scripts necessary to do an update. Expect to find different levels of completeness and support among the contributed modules. For popular modules by well-respected module authors, this won t be a problem, and most of the time, updates will be relatively painless. Regardless, you should update your contributed modules one at a time, testing the functionality of each one before moving on to the next. In the ideal case, you will do this on your test site before attempting the updates on a production site.
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210 CHAPTER 6 MAINTAINING YOUR SITE Replace Old Script Files The next step is to replace the old script files with the new distribution that you downloaded from Drupal.org. This can be accomplished most easily by moving the Drupal tar.gz file into the base of your installation and running the untar command. Here are the GNU/Linux commands to run from a shell to get the Drupal distribution and untar it (replace x.x.x with the version number to which you are updating): wget http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.x.x.tar.gz tar -zxvf drupal-x.x.x.tar.gz If your settings.php file is in the settings/default folder, make sure to have a backup on hand, since the preceding command will overwrite it. If your settings.php file is in a folder named after the site you are running, such as yoursite.com, this will not be a prob lem, and you can run the tar command without concern. This is an important point, as the upgrade script depends on the settings.php file (conf.php in Drupal 4.5 or earlier) to estab lish the database connection. It would be inconvenient for you to delete or overwrite this file, so double-check that it is still in place before moving on to the next step. Caution The instructions that are offered in the UPDATE.txt file say to Remove all the old Drupal files…. This does not mean that you should remove the files directory or its contents, or any custom themes or modules that you have developed. It means Remove the files that came with your original Drupal download. Run the Update Script Access update.php in your browser. Click the link run the database upgrade script. The update script is a chronological set of changes to be made, starting from early Drupal versions all the way to the most current version. Each change has a date associated with it. Drupal will look to see what your update history has been (the last time you ran this update script, a value that is stored in the database) and will suggest a starting date for your update process. If Drupal is unable to recognize the correct date, this is where your records will prove to be useful. When did you install Drupal? When was the last time you altered the database schema in any way? Pick a date that precedes or matches your installation or the last update. When you ve settled on a date, click Update, and the script will run. The update script is primarily focused on updating the database schema. Typical output for a successful update looks like the screen shown in Figure 6-4.
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