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phpBB is a popular open source bulletin board software package written in the PHP programming language. Unlike vBulletin, phpBB is free. However, depending on your needs, phpBB can serve as acceptable entry-level community forum software and provide you with the ability to add user-generated content to your Web site.

PhpBB is a popular open-source, bulletin board software package written in the PHP programming language. Unlike vBulletin, phpBB is free. However, depending on your needs, phpBB can serve as acceptable entry-level community forum software and provide you with the ability to add usergenerated content to your Web site. phpBB offers a large and highly customizable set of key features, including the ability to implement forum modifications and style changes.

Because phpBB is open source, there is a large range of existing modifications that have been written by other phpBB users and programmers, which you may find useful. Existing phpBB modifications such as Attachment modification provide you with the option to attach different types of files to your posts.

The Show Replies and Views in Topic modification displays the number of replies and views of the topic that your visitor reads. An extensive database of validated modifications is located at www.phpbb.com/mods/db. phpBB version 3 uses a powerful templating system that keeps the PHP code separate from the HTML code and gives you complete freedom to customize your forum the way you want. However, if you want to download additional styles and new graphics for your forum, you can do so at www.phpbb.com/styles/db. phpBB has an easy-to-use administration panel and a user-friendly installation process, which allows you to have your basic forum set up in minutes.

However, if you want to customize your forum, you can expect the process to take much longer, and it may require moderate-toadvanced expertise with PHP, CSS, HTML, and MySQL. You can download phpBB at www.phpbb.com/downloads. However, be sure to read and fully understand the license agreement before you download and use the software.

Selecting appropriate forum software is challenging, especially if you have an e-commerce Web site. If you have a minimal budget, your best bet is to go with phpBB because it is free. However, the other leading forum software, vBulletin, is inexpensive and is likely to be a better choice if you have an ecommerce Web site. There are a number of different factors to consider, and there is likely no better way of evaluating your options than finding out what other people in your situation have done.

HotScripts, located at www.hotscripts.com, is a popular Internet directory that compiles and disseminates Web programming–related resources and opinions. You can use HotScripts when you are exploring the pros and cons of different available forum and community software.

Through HotScripts, you can access user reviews from a variety of current and former phpBB and vBulletin users. Moreover, HotScripts allows users to provide a rating on a one-to-five scale of user satisfaction with each forum. Ratings and reviews are broken down by date because often forum software vendors provide regular updates to improve the software based on user comments, so older reviews may not be relevant.

A researcher once told me that, after observing numerous groups of people searching, it was clear that few wanted to learn how to search better. They just wanted results as quickly as possible. If the first page of results didn’t look promising, they’d try some new carewords. If results for these still didn’t look promising, most would assume that what they were looking for wasn’t on the Web.

Hardly anybody wanted to use advanced search, let alone an offline source. This is an opportunity for you because, if you can learn some basic search skills and take more time when preparing your search, you will be more efficient – and ultimately faster – at finding exactly what you need.

Here are some things to keep in mind when searching on the Web.

1. Plan. Take a few minutes to think about what it is you are searching for. Step back; don’t rush in. Clarifying exactly what it is you want to find will save wading through too many irrelevant results. Spend five minutes finding out about the advanced search features of the search engine you’re using.

2. Be patient and persistent. If you’re not getting the results you expect, rethink your approach. Is there another way of framing this search?

3. Be specific, then broad. There’s so much stuff out there that you need to start your search in a reasonably specific manner. Then, if you’re getting too few – or the wrong type of – results, broaden out.

It would be hard to find a computer user who hasn’t been exposed to Windows – the operating system for PCs and PC-based laptops. (A small slice of the computer world uses Linux, which is the same idea, differently expressed; Apple users use that company’s equivalent.) But relatively few users understand the real purpose of the operating system and its interrelation with the hardware and software that sit (in logical terms) below and above it. Let me try to explain. The job of Windows is to:

- Manage the hardware. Windows sits between the hardware and your applications with hooks into each. When a piece of software – a word processor, for example – wants to load a file into memory for editing, Windows receives the request and translates it into a command that the hardware can fulfill. Hardware must fit within certain specifications in order to work with PC motherboards and processors, but various components have differing capabilities; manufacturers develop a small piece of code called a driver that identifies hardware to the operating system.

- Manage the software. Similarly, software developers have a fairly wide latitude in the sort of tasks they can assign to their programs. However, there has to be a way for a single piece of software to interact uniformly with the nearly infinite combinations of hardware that exist within computers.

The job of Windows is to adapt the software commands to what it knows about the capabilities of the hardware. Windows also allocates the use of the computer’s memory and processor time so that various programs can coexist without conflicts and crashes. (Do I hear a guffaw out there? I’m with you . . . but it’s true that with each successive release and update of Windows, the number of system crashes and other failures has gone down. May we all live to celebrate the extermination of the final bug.)

- Manage the files. If you have a hard time this morning remembering where you put your keys, consider the fact that a typical computer has to remember the location of tens or hundreds of thousands of programs, snippets of information, and complete files. (I run an antivirus check on my computer once a week; the last time it found 262,384 files worth checking.) Windows oversees the creation and management of a set of interlocked tables and indexes of files. It’s all invisible to you, but oh so important.

- Show a pretty (and simpler) face. For most users, this is what it’s all about: Putting lipstick on an electronic pig. Those of us old enough to have used computers before the introduction of Windows (or Apple’s Macintosh operating system) remember that the screen was harsh and black. The machine sat there stubbornly presenting nothing more than a command prompt, a flashing dash that demanded that you, the user, tell it what to do. It was your job to type in the proper command to launch a program, format a disk, or copy or rename a file.

The arrival of Windows put a GUI (pronounced gooey) on the screen: a graphical user interface. A mouse or other pointing device was presented and allowed to click here, pick up and move something there, and even draw on the screen. Beneath that GUI, Windows translates it all into commands to the hardware and software.