Archive for the 'phpbb' Category
phpBB 3..is it worth the wait?
By Justin Silverton
phpBB is a very popular open-source bulletin board application written in php. Recently, a new development version has been released (for testing purposes only), which has many new improvements over the current version (2.X). Today, I decided to install it on one of my development servers to find out if it really is worth the wait.
Requirements
- A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System with support for PHP
- A SQL database system, one of:
- MySQL 3.23 or above (MySQLi supported)
- PostgreSQL 7.3+
- SQLite 2.8.2+
- Firebird 2.0+
- MS SQL Server 2000 or above (directly or via ODBC)
- Oracle
- PHP 4.3.3 or above (supported: 5.0.x & 5.1.x, compatible: 6.0-dev) with support for the database you intend to use.
- These optional presence of the following modules within PHP will provide access to additional features, but they are not required.
- zlib Compression support
- Remote FTP support
- XML support
- Imagemagick support
Installing
Installation was pretty straight forward. With this new version also comes a professional looking installer, which looks much better than previous versions.
Cool new features
A) Jabber communication. Users can now communicate through this open source instant messenging protocol.
B) An unlimited number of subforums can be created
C) Caching. Major performance and caching enhancements have been made which will allow it to support many more users.
D) Mod system improvements. The module system has been re-written from scratch to allow easy install of 3rd party addons/components.
Conclusion
phpBB 3 has many improvements over the previous versions and I will be installing it once it becomes stable. One of the one features I wish would be in the next version, but I did not see on the list is spam protection. It is the one thing that has been plaguing the phpbb community from the beginning.
More information and downloads of this new version can be found here
PHPbb SEO master Version 1.0 Released
PHPbb SEO Master Version 1.0 Released
Are you running a phpbb bulletin board? You may be missing out on important search engine traffic! phpbb SEO master will bring you more search engine hits than you ever had before
- Easy Install and works with your existing board
- Topic URLS are dynamically converted to SEO friendly addresses
- Forum URLS are dynamically converted to SEO friendly addresses
10 PHPbb SEO tips
By Justin Silverton
The following are 10 tips that will help you get better search engine placement with PHPbb(available for free here: http://www.phpbb.com/).
1) Remove the “View Latest Post” icon and link on index.php (Craven de Kere)
This is a page rank drain issue. The link is restored but the image is removed because it makes the page too “busy” and because the images are not as attractive as the text link we will subsequently create using the last post date.
2) Make the date of the last post link to the last post like the icon did on index.php
3) Unlink the username of the last post on index.php (Craven de Kere)As explained above the latest post link is now accessed from thelatestt post date. There are a few reasons for this. First of all a text link is almost always better than an image link. Secondly the text link will change (as the dates change). This makes the link more attractive to search engines but most importantly it provides a slight chance at more keyword traffic by branding the link with a date and time as a keyword.
This is purely for page rank drain and to direct the search engine spiders to the content. Pages with too many links are penalized by some search engialgorithmsyms. The links to the profiles are also not the focus of the site. Most users are not searching the internet for information in your users’ profiles. So this helps direct the search engines to the content on the topics instead of the many other links search engines could follow.
4) Remove listing of moderators on index.php
This is a MOD by John Abela. It removes the listing of moderators on the index page. This helps make the page less “busy” and also helps direct the spiders toward the content and not the profiles. It reduces the index page’s queries by 2, so it also helps improve forum speed a bit.
5) Remove session IDs for all search engine spiders
This is a crucial part of this mod. It is based on code that was posted by a user named Darlantan but it is unclear who wrote the original snippet.
This code removsessionion IDs for all guests. This means ALL spiders can spider your forum without session IDs in the URLs.
NOTE: This means you can’t enable guest posting to your forums. It won’t hamper guests in any way other than disallowing them to post. phpBB recently improved security with their session IDs so this code strikes a perfect balance between session ID integrity and search engine spidering.
6) Unlink the username of the last post on viewforum.php
This is purely for page rank drain and to direct the search engine spiders to the content. Pages with too many links are penalized by some search engialgorithmsyms. The links to the profiles are also not the focus of the site. Most users are not searching the internet for information in your users’ profiles. So this helps direct the search engines to the content on the topics instead of the many other links search engines could follow.
7) Remove the “View Latest Post” icon and link on viewforum.php
This is a page rank drain issue. The link is restored but the image is removed because it makes the page too “busy” and because the images are not as attractive as the text link we will subsequently create using the last post date.
8) Make the date of the last post link to the last post like the icon did on viewforum.php
As explained above the latest post link is now accessed from thelatestt post date. There are a few reasons for this. First of all a text link is almost always better than an image link. Secondly the text link will change (as the dates change). This makes the link more attractive to search engines but most importantly it provides a slight chance at more keyword traffic by branding the link with a date and time as a keyword.
9) Unlink the author username on viewforum.php
This is purely for page rank drain and to direct the search engine spiders to the content. Pages with too many links are penalized by some search enginalgorithmsms. The links to the profiles are also not the focus of the site. Most users are not searching the internet for information in your users’ profiles. So this helps direct the search engines to the content on the topics instead of the many other links search engines could follow.
10) Remove signatures for guest views
This modification removes repetitive text from the topic pages. As signatures are text that is not usually relevant to the topic they distract search engines dilutelute the key words. This makes the signatuinvisibleible for guests so that search engines (and guests!) focus on the content of the topic. it also helps if you allow users to put links in their signatures as you will not lose any page rank through these links anymore.
The above tips were originally found in an a forum post here: http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html
A commercial plugin can also be found here