Yes, it is yet another guide to install something. I must have done like 7 or 8 of these “pictorials” in the past 2 to 3 weeks and maybe I should take a rest. Na, I will continue doing them. I am pretty sure that this can be very useful to beginners. I remembered that when I first wanted to setup a forum, I had no idea how to begin and where to go for help. Most of the guides were usually text and can be pretty confusing, especially if you have no experience. Anyways, I have done this guide for setting up the SMF forum script. One of the more popular open source forum scripts out there. Maybe not as common as PhpBB, but in my opinion it is still a pretty solid script. My first forum was based on the SMF forum script as well. It worked very well for me then and even though I have stopped being a forum webmaster, I am certain that it is still very capable as I have seen a lot of forums using SMF. Kudos to the developers!

As usual, these scripts require PHP and MySQL support from your webhost. Yes, most webhost supports these. The version of SMF I am using is 1.1.5 as will be shown below. According to SMF’s site, your webhost must have PHP version 4.1.0 and MySQL 3.23.28 for the script to work. Don’t worry, most webhosts should have at least that or else they should have gone bust long long time ago.

Goto SMF’s website and download the latest version. At the time of writing, the latest version is 1.1.5, so I downloaded that. I have chosen the zip file instead of the rest because I am using Windows. If you are using Linux or others, you can try using the tarball versions. For Windows, even if you don’t have any third party unzipping software, you can still extract out the files as WinXP is capable of handling zip files without any problems. Make sure you remember where you download the files to on your PC.

I am using Winrar to extract out the files. You can of course use any achieving software to extract the files. Their methods should be pretty easy as well. Just remember where you save the extracted files to. You will need the files to upload to your web server.

I am using Filezilla as my FTP Client to transfer files onto my webserver. Again, you can use any FTP Client to do that. Since all FTP clients support uploading and downloading of files, you should have no problems transfering files to your webserver. However, you will need your FTP username, password and the hostname of your FTP server. Please get those information from your web host.

What you need to do is to upload all the files and folders from the extracted zipped file to your webhost. Remember to only upload the files (and folders) and not the extracted folder itself. If you do that you are actually created a subdirectory called “smf_1-1-5_install” on your site. So for example, if your website’s URL is “www.goodboy.com”, your forum’s ULR will then be at www.goodboy.com/smf_1-1-5_install/. I am sure that is not you want.

It will take a while, so go and have a beer or something. After 15 to 20 minutes, come back and all is done.

After that, you will need to start your browser and point it to your site’s URL. The SMF forum script will detect that the script is not properly configured and will automatically run the installation script for you. You will be directed to a page like above. You can key in the FTP details and let the script setup the permissions for you. Or you can be clever and do it yourself. Please take note of the names of the folders and files you will need to give SMF access to.

If you are looking to set the permissions yourself, you will need to return to the FTP Client. If you are using Filezilla, right click on the folder or file and choose File attributes. If you are using another FTP Client, there should be some option for you to set your privileges. Please refer to your software documentation. Again, I would like to say, it is not difficult to do.

Chmod “777″ (all permissions) on the folder or file. And then click Ok. You will need to do this for all the folders and files listed above. Enjoy.

After you have completed setting up the correct privileges for the folders and files, go back to your browser and click on “Click here to test of these files are writable again”. If all is okay, you will be directed to another page. If not, it will return to this page and you will need to recheck which file or folder is not properly set.

The next step you need to do is for you to do some basic setting changes. Please key in your forum name. You usually don’t need to change your forum URL as it will be automatically configured for you. You can also modify some of the other settings like whether you want to use Gzip Output (compression), database sessions, UTF-8 character set and allow Simple Machines to collect your site’s stats.

Below that, you will be prompted to provide information about your database. Yes, you will first need to create a MySQL database in order for it to work with SMF. If you have no idea on how to create those databases, please refer to these two guides on how to setup MySQL databases. The first tutorial is for Cpanel and the other is for DirectAdmin control panel. If you are using some other control panel, you will get your web host to help you create the database. What you need is the hostname, the database name, the username and the password (of the user) for that database.

Once you have the information, you will need to key them on this page. For the MySQL table prefix, you can use anything unique. If you don’t have any other installations on the same database, then you don’t even need to have a prefix. Click on Proceed once you are done.

The next step is for you to create an Administrator account. Key in your desired username and password as well as your email address. Oh, you will need to supply the database password again for security reasons. Click on Finish after you are done.

There, everything is done. Well, not quite. Please click on”your newly installed forum” and check whether there are any problems with your forum installation.

Well, we have a major security risk! We have not removed install.php. Bad, bad boy. This will allow hackers to access our installation and modify settings. This is something which we all would not like. So you will need to remove that pesky “install.php”.

So go back to your FTP Client and look for install.php on the remote site and then delete it.

Now let’s all go back to the browser and check whether the warning still remains? Well, it is not there anymore. Looks like we are pretty safe from hackers and evil-doers. In fact, one of SMF’s main features is that it is a very secure script.

So here ends the tutorial. You have just installed one of the best open sourced forum scripts out there and it took about 20-30 minutes in total. That should include the uploading of the files to your webserver. And it was pretty easy right? Nowadays, scripts are getting much easier to setup than before, so don’t worry, you should get your forum up and running in no time!