In the previous chapters you’ve read about how your board works and how to customize the way it looks. Some advanced topics were skipped so that you could concentrate on the most important and widely used phpBB features. It’s now time to master phpBB, and go through details that will make you a real power-phpBB-admin.
In this chapter you’ll learn about:
- Making your board multi-lingual
- Configuring avatars
- Managing smilies
- Assigning ranks
- Forum permissions
- User permissions
- Usergroups and group permissions
- Database backups and restore—a second look
- The human side—moderators, flamewars, and banning
phpBB is developed to support multiple languages in the same board. The whole interface (screens, messages, buttons, emails, and so on) is translated into more than 50 languages. The translators are not members of the phpBB team, but are native-speaking volunteers, and this guarantees that the translations are correct and ready to be installed on your board. Thus, you provide a better service for your community, giving them an interface they feel more comfortable with.
- Go to the phpBB.com downloads page http://www.phpbb.com/downloads.php.
- Scroll down to the Language & Image Packs section and locate the Español (Spanish) row:
- Choose your preferred compression type—ZIP or GZIP—and download the two archives in the selected format. Lets choose the ZIP format as an example. The first ZIP file contains the texts for the phpBB interfaces, and the second one contains the interface graphics, such as the buttons for a new post, quote, and so on. These graphics are provided for the default subSilver theme only.
- Uncompress the first file,
lang_spanish.zip(and FTP it if youre using a hosted service), into thelanguagedirectory within your phpBB directory. This should create alang_spanishsubdirectory underlanguage. - Uncompress the second file,
subSilver_spanish.zip, to a selected directory. When you do this, youll notice that it has a nested directory structure, and in your selected directory, youll have asubSilver/images/lang_spanishpath. If you follow this path, youll find a number of GIF files. - Copy (and/or FTP) the last directory (lang_spanish, the one that contains all the GIF files) into your corresponding phpBB directory,
templates/subSilver/images.
After you have successfully uncompressed the ZIP archives and copied their content, your forum structure will look like the following screenshot:
Now if you log in to your forum and access your profile, you’ll see that the Board Language dropdown now has two values, as shown in the illustration:
If you change your preference to Spanish, you’ll see the whole board with a Spanish interface. ¡Hola!
Now you have two languages installed, but English is still the default language for the board. If your community is mainly Spanish speaking, you can consider changing the default language. To do that you need to go to the Administration Panel and follow the Configuration link under General Admin.