I have been looking forward to the Bulletin Board part of the class since I first heard about it.  I have wanted to have my own bulletin board for some time now.  We installed phpbb2.  It installs like Wordpress did, where you copy all the files to your webserver, then goto the URl where it is located and Presto! there is an installation screen.  From there you're logged into the administration panel.  I have a lot of experience with bulletin boards as a user so I did not have to spend any time learning about what a bulletin board is or how it is organized or why anyone would want to use it.  I immediately created several categories and boards for each category.  Just like Mediawiki it helps to organize prior to actually implementing.  In creating the different boards, I was allowed to set security on each of them.  I made my boards viewable only by memebers.  The purpose being that I don't want to give everyone on the internet access to my fishing knowledge.  I only want to share it with people that I know, that have registered to use the board.

Next I changed the logo from the phpbb2 to a picture of my dogs.  A fishing picture would be more appropiate, but I'm just testing the software.  For my project I will be using a different software, but will have appropiate images.  I thought about changing the theme and realized that the default theme, as is often the case, the easiest to read.  I'm more interested in making the site easy to use than I am in its esthetics.  I keep the default theme.  Ben found a cool looking theme that is still easy to read, so I may revisit that decision when I do the project.

I create and account for Ben and he registers.  Now I got someone wanting to test my site.  Cool.  Ben does the same for me.  It lets us verify that only people we approve of can use the Bulletin Board.  I love that kind of control.  I also set the GMT to -7 so it has the proper time.  I set the board so whomever logs in can choose what theme they want to use.  There is an option to force users to use the same theme, which might be a good idea for business trying to keep its branding that they work so hard to achieve.

Overall phpbb2 was a simple to install, simple to configure, well done piece of open source software.  It could easily be used for corporate applications, with little customization.

Ok, I'm off to look at Studio 8 assignements and get cracking on those.

E