Introduction

Following my dumping of drupal I had to go back to the drawing board in terms of managing the content for my homepage. I wanted to have my own stories and aggregated RSS feeds displayed, integrated into the phpBB forum on the site.

Armed with no knowledge of php but some of html, sql and general programming skills (I was a professional developer about 10 years ago) I decided to look into extending phpBB to be the architecture of my entire site! This idea was further encouraged by my analysis of the available image galleries that were available off the shelf (for free obviously I didn’t want to actually pay for anything).

Extending phpBB

It is possible to create a blank phpBB page very simply and because of phpBB’s templating system it’s really easy to setup pages with the same header, look and feel as the main site. And you get to take advantage of loads of cool phpBB features like user and session management, security, caching etc. In fact I soon came to realise that I could use it for Content Management as well…

To make a new page on your website that extends phpBB you do the following:

Create a new php file with the following content, the first bit sets it up as part of phpBB and so needs to know where the forum is. On my site the custom page as at the root of www.dirtmind.com and the forum lives in www.dirtmind.com/forum if you have a different structure you’ll have to edit the second proper line of code to tell if your PHPBB_ROOT_PATH.

<?php
/**
* @ignore
*/
define('IN_PHPBB', true);
$phpbb_root_path = (defined('PHPBB_ROOT_PATH')) ?
  PHPBB_ROOT_PATH : './forum/';
$phpEx = substr(strrchr(__FILE__, '.'), 1);
include($phpbb_root_path . 'common.' . $phpEx);

// Start session
$user->session_begin();
$auth->acl($user->data);
$user->setup();  

page_header($user->lang['PAGE_TITLE']); 

//Custom code goes here

//Tell phpBB which template to use for the output:
$template->set_filenames(array(
 'body'    => 'output_template.html'
 ));  

page_footer();
?>

One of what I soon came to realise was one of the most common mistakes with doing this (and was my most common mistake) was to accidentally include blank lines before or after the tags this leads an error similar to:

[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/session.php on line 990:
Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output
started at /includes/auth.php:1040)

So this php page doesn’t actually have any output or display stuff in it, it’s just doing functional things so here I could do my RSS processing or whatever. To link up the page to an ouput template you can see a line that maps “body” to “output_template.html” and this file lives in your forum templates directory which in my case would be “./forum/styles/mystyle/template/output_template.html“. Here’s what a very simple output template could look like:

<!-- INCLUDE overall_header.html -->
<p>Your HTML goes here</p>
<!-- INCLUDE overall_footer.html -->

That’s it! So now you’ve got a new page on your website that’s hooked into the phpBB system.

To see this in action just look at any page on DirtMind that isn’t part of the forum like the homepage

Conclusion

Even with no php knowledge it’s really easy to make pages of your website have the same look and feel as your forum, and the amount of functionality that phpBB provides  means that it’s an excellent architecture for making a web app.