One thing that I get asked by a lot of people, is how do I incorporate a forum into my website, so that it blends and functions well. Well in all honesty, to add a forum to your website is really not as hard as it may seem. The hard part is customizing it so it looks the same as every other page on your website, or at least have a similar color and layout.

Before we begin talking about installing and customizing your forum, you need to know where to get it from. First off, a very popular option that businesses use, is to hire a freelance coder to make the forum software. This can work out good if you have a lot of money, and a good web programmer. The problem is though, good web programmers are somewhat hard to find, and not everyone wants to spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t even know will work or not!

That is where the open source solutions come in. The two best open source PHP forum scripts that exist on the internet today, is SimpleMachines and PHPBB. Both of these forums are free to use, so long as you keep a link back to their website in the footer, and are pretty easy to install. Out of the two though, I would have to say SimpleMachines is by far the best, and easiest to install. In fact the installation is basically on autopilot, and all you have to do is upload the files to your websites server.

Installation of your Forum

This will obviously vary depending on what forum script you install, but the main procedure for all of them is uploading the files to a sub directory on your website, or at the root level if you wanted your website to be dedicated entirely to the forum. You then just type in the web address of the index file, of your forum. That is really as much as I can tell you about that, because like I said, the installation procedure varies.

One thing is for sure though, most forum software uses PHP, so you will need to also set up a database for your forum, using your PHP my admin or hosting provider tools.

Forum Customization

So like I was saying before, the really hard part is customizing your forum. Now if you don’t have really good experience in web programming or the PHP/Javascript language, or you don’t want to spend a lot of your time doing it, then I recommend you hire a freelancer to do it for you. In fact, our services can include forum installation and customization if you wanted us to do it for you.

If you do want to do it yourself though, the best forum software that allows easy customization is the SimpleMachines forum. They basically have one file that controls the layout of your forum, so when you want to change something, or make it better, you only have to change it in that one file. It cannot get much easier then that!

As for customizing other forum software though, I could really not tell you at this point, since I have not needed to customize another type of forum yet. I can only hope though that it will only involve tweaking one file, so updating will be clean and easy.