224 CHAPTER 7 INTRODUCING PHPBB Highly customizable (Web site developers)
224 CHAPTER 7 INTRODUCING PHPBB Highly customizable profiles: Users can express themselves with signatures, avatars, and personal profiles. Additionally, the administrator can configure rankings based on post count or group memberships for further community building. Private messaging: Users have the ability to send private messages to each other, with an administrator-configured limit on inbox size. Users can use all the formatting of a regular post, including smilies, in their private messages. phpBB notifies users of new private messages with an optional pop-up window and a counter in the header section of each phpBB page. Additionally, administrators can disable a user s ability to send private messages. Powerful forum search: The phpBB search tool can search for keywords and authors, and display search results either in a list with post text or in a topic list. phpBB highlights your search terms in your results to make locating your keywords much easier. Who s online: Users and administrators alike can see who s browsing the forums at any given time. Additionally, administrators have the option of seeing the IP address of online users in the administration panel to help with security. Administrative Features phpBB is equipped, by default, with a great deal of functionality for customizing and operating your community. You can even add additional features via modifications, if you so desire. phpBB s administrative features permit you to Decide who is allowed to do what: Using the permissions system, you can set your forums to be registration-only, and configure what types of users can do what. You can go as far as restricting guests from viewing certain forums, if you desire. Paired with the groups system, permissions are a pervasive feature in phpBB. Manage groups of users: You can use phpBB s usergroups feature to apply common characteristics, such as permission levels, to a group of people, such as your moderators. You can assign groups as moderators of forums, which is particularly useful if you want to have a group that can moderate every forum. Keep forums clean with automatic pruning: You can set certain forums to automatically clean themselves up with phpBB s automatic pruning (commonly referenced in phpBB as autoprune) feature, which identifies inactive threads and eradicates them, helping to keep your community operating smoothly and to eliminate deadwood. Mass e-mail your members: If you have a major announcement about your boards, you can simply use the mass e-mail feature to contact your members. You can also limit contact to certain groups in contrast to all users in bulk. Back up and restore your database without tangling with command-line utilities: phpBB s administration panel offers backup and restore functionality, which dumps the contents of your phpBB database to a file on your hard drive. This functionality is especially useful for people who may or may not have command-line access to their server, as not all hosts provide that functionality.
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