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.

  1. 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!).
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. [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.
  7. [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.

 

Thank you for using PunBB!

Rickard Andersson
rickard@punbb.org
http://www.punbb.org/