Killed San Juan forum already… reborn bigger and better

After a little bit of time horsing around with that San Juan Islands news and headlines forum I discovered the forum software I had chosen ( phpBB ) was difficult to customize and suffered from a dwindling developer base. That means not much innovation happening with the add-in’s and new features. So after some research ( a couple hours ) I found the simple machines forum. It had all of the extras that I wanted such as RSS feeds for each board and topic plus numerous cool add-ins that allow you to insert Google advertising, and even revenue share amongst people who are posting to your newsgroup. The kind of stuff that Web developers have wet dreams about.

rundown of the simple machines forum on my Dreamhost account

I tried to do the web install of simple machines forum on my Dreamhost account without any luck. So don’t try that. I ended up just doing the manual installation which was very easy anyway. I just created the database within the control panel, uploaded the files to my account, visited the install page and followed through the installation wizard. Everything went well and then I proceeded to customize the gallery by changing the theme and downloading and installing a couple plug-ins. Installing the plug-ins was quite easy as well; just downloaded the zip files from the mod website and then uploaded them through the forum’s control panel. Once they are uploaded to you have the option to activate or deactivate them. You are supposed to back up everything before you do this but I did not because I am a web developer Maverick. A top gun web developer not a Naval aviator that will take your breath away. The theme/template that I downloaded is nice on the eyes and visually stimulating. Hopefully it will excite people enough to get involved in the discussion. The template came from this website http://www.dzinerstudio.com/. The new template/theme even provided a Photoshop file with the layers preserved so you could easily customize the theme to your liking. If I told you any more I would have to kill you.