Installation instructions for PunBB 1.1
This document includes installation and upgrade instructions for
PunBB 1.1. If you are upgrading from 1.0 or 1.0.1, skip to section
3.
1. Requirements
MySQL: Version 3.23 or later is recommended. PunBB will probably
work with older versions though.
PostgreSQL: PunBB 1.1 has only been tested on version 7.3.3 of
PostgreSQL. It should work fine with any version greater than 7.0
though.
2. Installation
Copy/upload all contents of the directory upload/ into the
directory where you want to run your forums. Run install.php from
the forum root directory through your browser. Follow the
instructions. If you get an error when trying to upload avatar
images, make sure that the webserver user has write access to the
directory where you store avatars (default is img/avatars/). Please
report any problems you might encounter during installation in the
forums at http://forums.punbb.org/.
3. Upgrading from 1.0 and 1.0.1
Follow these instructions to update your current 1.0/1.0.1
installation to 1.1. It is recommended that the forum be put into
maintenance mode (Admin/Options) during the update procedure.
NOTE: Make backups before proceeding! Use the
tool mysqldump for MySQL and pg_dump for PostgreSQL. Also backup
any CSS (style/) and template files (include/template/) that you
have made changes to.
- Update all scripts and files to 1.1. Some of the filenames have
changed, so if you don't mind having old files lying around, just
extract the 1.1 archive into the same directory as your old
installation (overwriting any existing files). If you want a more
clean install, remove the old files before extracting the new (once
again, make backups!).
- If you are using a language pack for your forums (other than
english), you must update that as well. Language packs for PunBB
1.0 are not compatible with 1.1. Check the download page at the
PunBB website to see if there is an updated pack for your
language.
- Copy/upload the script 10_to_11_update.php from the directory
scripts/ to the forum root directory and run it through your
browser. A message will appear when the update process has
completed. Once the update script has finished you should remove
the script from the forum root directory.
- Update any custom made styles to include the new CSS classes
TABLE.punspacer, .punedited and .puntitle. For reference, see the
default styles included in the 1.1 package.
- Update any altered templates so that the template variables are
enclosed in <> instead of {}. I.e. {pun_title} should be
changed to <pun_title>. For reference, see the default
templates included in the 1.1 package.
- [Optional] If you like, you can remove the directories docs/
and extra/ in the forum root directory. These directories are no
longer used and have been moved out of the forum root.
- [Optional] Update your config.php to include the new setting
for cookie name. Add a line above $cookie_domain that looks like
this: "$cookie_name = 'punbb_cookie';". If you change the name of
the forum cookie, users will have to login the next time they visit
the forums. If you choose not to add this line to config.php, PunBB
will use the default cookie name punbb_cookie.
You should now be running PunBB 1.1.
4. Maximizing performance
Here are some recommendations for maximizing the performance of
PunBB. The recommendations are not directly related to PunBB
performance. They are very general and results may vary.
- Run it in a UNIX-like operating system!
- Use the Apache webserver and compile PHP as a static module for
Apache.
- Use a PHP cache/accelerator tool. I recommend Turck
MMCache.
- Make sure that PHP has zlib support so you can enable gzip
output compression in Admin/Options. This greatly reduces the size
of the HTML output at the cost of a little CPU time. An alternative
is to use the Apache module mod_gzip. The two methods yield similar
results.
- Visit the administration interface and disable any forum
features that are not used or you feel are unnecessary.
Thank you for using PunBB!
Rickard Andersson
rickard@punbb.org
http://www.punbb.org/