phpBB version 3.0 is an open-source forum application that can be downloaded from phpbb.com. It is installed on your webhost server.
For this tutorial, we assume that the forum have been installed correctly and that you have an admin login. It will look something like this...
As you can see, the installation already comes with one forum with one post already present.
Now we will show you how to make your first forum post.
1. Before anyone can make any post, they have to register in the forum and then log in. The installation already has an admin user created, so we will just log in as an admin to make our first post. We will assume that the admin has the username of "admin". Put "admin" as the username and then the password. And click the "login" button.
2. You can tell that you have logged in, because the "login" link has changed to the "logout" link.
It also shows the username that is currently logged in. Note that the link "Moderator Control Panel" is not available to regular forum users. We see this here only because we have logged in as admin. That link is shown only to admins and moderators with sufficient permission to moderate posts.
Just some terminology... As denoted in the above picture. "Categories" contain "forums". And each forum can contain "topics". Topics are discussion threads and users can create a new topics or respond to an existing topics which is called a "post".
3. Click the forum link to go into the first forum. And as you can see below, this first forum has one topic titled "Welcome to phpBB3". Let's see what this topic talks about by clicking on the topic link.
4. As seen below, this is an example topic that came with the phpBB installation. For practice and as an example, we will reply to this topic by clicking on the "Post Reply" button.
5. We are presented with a web-editor where we can type our reply. It is recommended that you checkmark the "Notify me when a reply is posted" option so that whenever someone else replies to this topic, you can get notified by email. If tutorial on how to have this notification checkmarked by default.
You can click "Preview" to preview your response. Or just click "Submit" to post the response.
6. And we see that our reply has been posted ...
Click that link at the bottom to return back to the forum.
7. Now we click the "New Topic" button to create a new topic...
8. Type subject and body of topic (and checkmark notification option) and click submit ...
9. You see that your new topic has been posted...
Click the link to return to forum.
10. You now see that you have two topics in this forum with the newer topic on top...
11. As admin, you have the ability to delete posts and delete topics. Go back into the "Welcome to phpBB3" topic and you will see a "X" icon in the upper right corner of each post where you can delete a post. At the bottom is "Quick-mod tools" droplist where you can delete the whole topic along with all posts in the topic.
12. In both cases, it will ask you to confirm you intention to delete.
Note: this tutorial was written based on version 3.0.5 of phpBB
