Been digging around in the guts of PHPbb (or is it phpBB?) today to help get the Squadron of Shame’s forum looking the way we want it to. And while there’s still some work to do, things are coming together very nicely.

I haven’t really explored a self-hosted forum solution before — I’ve set up forums for various people in the past, but have always made use of pre-made free services, since that was all we needed to fit our needs at the time. In the case of the Squadron of Shame, we’re trying to make this place our permanent home on the Interwebs, since we’ve been flitting around from place to place every so often ever since the 1up forums imploded.

Mostly, I’ve been impressed with phpBB’s (let’s go with that spelling for the sake of argument) flexibility and customisability. There are a whole lot of options you can tweak, and in doing so you can make the forum function in plenty of different ways — you can adjust the way users can interact with it, assign various levels of permissions to users, allow or disallow various board features and extend the functionality with plugins and mods.

The only real downside to it all, so far as I can make out, is that installing the aforementioned plugins and mods looks like a bit of a pain in the arse, eschewing a handy-dandy automated install process a la off-the-peg CMS systems such as WordPress and instead in most cases demanding that you edit multiple HTML, CSS and script files, uploading new files to the server and generally doing a whole lot of things manually.

It’s been relatively minor issue so far, though, since most of the things I’ve wanted to do with the board have so far been covered by phpBB’s comprehensive administration panel — including uploading attachments such as images, which is something that appeared to be significantly more difficult to include in previous incarnations of phpBB (we’re using version 3).

It’s been interesting, though, since, as I said above, it’s not something I’ve really poked around in before. I’ve been learning a lot about what phpBB is capable of, and how it provides a flexible solution for building an online community with relatively minimal fuss. Of course, I haven’t been getting involved on the hardcore coding and styling side of things — I’m leaving that up to my friend Mark, fellow founding member of the Squad and someone who does this sort of thing for a living — but I have been doing things that I’m able to easily resolve through a bit of tinkering in the admin panel. (I’m less likely to break things that way, too; past experience with manually fiddling around with templates and CSS files has taught me that I’m good at breaking things.)

Plus there’s always the possibility that this sort of knowledge might prove useful in future job hunts. You never know. And it’s not as if I have anything better to do right now, is it?