A Fresh Start

Here’s a handy article if you want to run two versions of PHPBB2 sharing things like membership between the two boards.

You can also use this technique to run two separate copies of exactly the same board under different URLs.

You will need:

• a PHPBB2 board running somewhere in your webspace
• more webspace
• phpMyAdmin
• an FTP program
• a text editor (Notepad’s just fine)
• a doughnut

1. Download the files for your existing PHPBB2 forum (or take a copy of the folder) to your computer.
2. In the new copy, open the config.php file in the text editor and choose a new table prefix (I’ll be assuming the original and new versions use ‘xxxx_’ and ‘yyyy_’ respectively). Save the changes.
3. Open includes/constants.php in your text editor
4. Replace
   $table_prefix.'
   with
   'yyyy_
   (i.e. hard-code in the first board’s prefix for most of the tables), EXCEPT for the
   define('CONFIG_TABLE', $table_prefix.'config');
   row.
5. Using phpMyAdmin take a copy of the existing xxxx_config table, calling the copy yyyy_config (it must be in the same database, of course) using the ‘View dump (schema) of table’ option. You’ll have to tick the ‘Structure and data’ and ‘Save as file’ options.
6. Open the xxxx_config.sql file in your text editor and replace xxxx_ with yyyy_ throughout. Save the new version as yyyy_config.sql.
7. Back in phpMyAdmin run this new SQL query to build a copy of the config table in your MySQL database.
8. Create a new directory in your webspace and upload the copy of the database code, including the new versions of config.php and includes/constants.php.
9. Point your URL to this new folder and ta-da! Your old forum will now appear under a second URL and you can change its configuration so that it looks completely different.

Nifty, eh?

Now have a doughnut - you deserve it.