This tutorial will guide you through installing Simple Machines Forums on your web server.  This tutorial is oriented towards installing it on your Windows XP, Vista, or Server 2003 Apache XAMPP server, but should be the same for just about any server you install it to.

OVERVIEW

Simple Machines Forums is a nice looking, fully functional free php forum software.  I recently looked into SMF because while investigating forums that will integrate with Joomla, I found that there is a bridge for the latest version of SMF, which is 2.0 beta at the time of writing this, and so I figured I would check it out and see how it works.  At a brief overview, I learned it is VERY easy to install, it has a nice look and it's not overly complicated when it comes to the layout and management of it.

It also has bridging plugins to integrate it with a variety of CMS softwares such as Joomla, Mambo, e107, Xoops, and iGamingCMS.  The last four mentioned can be downloaded directly from the Simple Machines website and the Joomla one can be found in the Joomla Extensions repository.  The one I found is for SMF 2.x and can be downloaded from this link.

INSTALLING SMF

The first thing you need to do is create a database for the forum.  If you do not know how to do this, then view this tutorial on how to do so.

If you haven't downloaded SMF yet, you can do so from http://www.simplemachines.org/download/ .

Now, using a FTP program or if you have direct folder access, copy the files for SMF to a sub-folder in your htdocs or your website's root folder.  You can name the folder something like SMF, forum, etc to make it easy to access.

Next, open your browser and go to http://localhost/smf/install.php or whatever the correct path is to your forum directory.

You should see this screen:

Give your forum a name.

Verify that the URL for your forum is correct.  If this will be a public forum, you will need to change this from localhost.

I'm not sure how much of a performance difference the Gzip Output makes, but if you decide to use it, make SURE you click the "here" link to test and make sure it works.

You can probably leave the Database Sessions checked.

Now set the UTF-8 Character Set option to your choice.  I honestly don't know what difference it makes, so choose as you wish.

Lastly, choose if whether or not you want Simple Machines to collect stats on your forum.  This is most likely for them to collect information for future development and improvements.

The bottom half of this page pertains to your database settings.  Enter the information accordingly and then click Proceed.  You can leave the MySQL table prefix as is if you like.

Now create your administrator account.  Enter the information as you wish.
At the bottom you must enter the MySQL database password.  I'm not sure what the purpose of this is, but they claim it's a security feature.  I'd have to say if someone has gotten this far without your permission, you've got bigger problems anyways.

Click the checkbox to try and automatically remove the install.php file.  If this for some reason doesn't work, just go to your SMF folder or whatever you named it and delete it manually.  Leaving it poses a major risk to your content.

Now click on your newly installed forum to begin using your forum.  This should take you to the front page of your forum, which should look similar to this:

And that's it!

And those easy steps make this probably the easiest forum software I've ever installed so far.  You can click on the ADMIN tab at the top to start configuring your SMF settings to your liking.

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