Creating a new forum in phpBB 3.0

One of the basic features of a  board administrator is to create new forums for your users in your phpBB board. The ability to create forums is only found in the Administator Control Panel, so only those with access to that panel can do so. Forums are ‘containers’ that house the topics and replies. They are usually organized in some way. For example, if you have a ‘Sports’ category, you may want to have separate ‘Baseball’ and ‘Basketball’ forums. Inside each, the users will create different topics about their respecitve sport. The instructions below will demonstrate how to create a brand new forum for your site.

How to create a new forum in phpBB 3.0

1. Log into your phpBB Administrator Control Panel (ACP).
2. From there, click on the Forums tab located across the top of the page.
3. This brings you to the Forums management screen. In the lower right corner of the screen, enter the name of the your new forum. Click on the Create New Forum button. In our example, the forum is named First New Forum.
   
4. You will be taken to the forum settings page. The top section is the most important for new forums. There are several fields and settings to set up and customize when creating a new forum. Below is a table of the basic fields and their explanations. If you are unsure about the settings here, don’t worry. They can always be changed later on. There are other sections below with many more settings for customization, but they are not important to the forum’s creation and will be explained in later articles.
   

   Forum Type	Choose your forum type from the dropdown (Category, Forum, Link). In this case, we want to choose Forum.
   Parent Forum	Select the parent of your new forum. You can have unlimited subfolders and place a new forum under a category, another forum, or have it be independent. In our example. we are going to place the forum under the category named Your First Category.
   Copy Permissions From	Select a forum to copy your permissions from. If none, you will need to create permissions before it is active. Since we are provided with a default forum to select from, we will copy permissions from Your First Forum.
   Forum Name	Give your forum a name.
   Description	A statement describing the forum and its purpose.
   Forum Image	Input the path for the forum’s image. This is not a required field, so if you do not have an image ready or do not want one, simply leave it blank.
   Forum Password	If you want to password protect your forum, enter the desired password here.
   Confirm Forum Password	Re-enter the same password as above for confirmation.
   Forum Style	Select your forum’s style from the dropdown. This is a cosmetic change and can be changed later, so if you are unsure, simply leave Default Style selected.

5. Once you have configured your first forum, scroll to the bottom and click on the Submit button to save your new forum and it’s configuration. Your new forum will now appear in the forum list for its appropriate category. You will see it from the main screen when you click on the parent category.
   

   Now that you have learned to create a forum, you can either wait for visitors to register and create their own topics, or you may want to create a few topics of your own.