How to Install MyBB Forum on Windows

This article explains how to Install MyBB Forum on Windows

MyBB Forum

MyBB forum is free and open-source forum software. It is intuitive, extensible, and incredibly powerful forum software. It offers good features like forums to threads, posts to private messages, search for profiles, and reputation to warnings.

This forum has everything you need to have to run a community or forum website. There are a good number of themes and plugins available to extend functionality.

MyBB Features,

Plugins – Supports the plugin system to make adding more features to the forum easy.
Themes – built-in template and theme editor gives you complete control over your forum’s design.
Moderation – Powerful and convenient tools for forum moderators and staff to work by your side.
Administration – Developed and refined to put you in full control of your forum.
Discussions – Infinite possibilities arise from every conversation on your forum.
Users – Features to keep your users engaged and active.
Messaging – Participate in private conversations with several registered users at a time.
Performance – MyBB has been carefully developed to be both powerful and extremely efficient

You can use XAMPP, WAMP or any other web development software. This will help you to evaluate the forum before moving to production

Pre-Requisite

This tutorial assumes a basic working knowledge of the Windows Operating system.

Software/Tools

Microsoft Windows 8.1/10 32/64 Bit Operating System (Buy from Microsoft Store
XAMPP Version: 5.6.28– Free Apache Distribution
MyBB 1.8.13

MyBB Installation Guide

Follow step by step for complete installation.

Download MyBB forum software

Download forums software from the official download page. 1.8.13 is the current version at the time of writing this article. It is a zip file.

Click on Download MyBB 1.8.13 button shown in below image.

Start XAMPP Apache and MySQL service

Open XAMPP control panel and start Apache and MySQL service. Both services are needed. Make sure Module icon turns green and PID(s) and Ports(s) are populated.

Create MySQL Database and User

MyBB needs a MySQL database to store database object. Open PHPMyAdmin create user and database. Create MYSQL Database MyBB and User mybbadmin as shown below using phpMyAdmin dashboard.

Start forum installation wizard

Extract downloaded file to a drive. It has 2 folders upload and documentation. Rename upload folder to mybb and copy it to C:\xampp\htdocs folder where XAMPP is installed.

Open a web browser and type http://localhost/mybb on the address bar. It opens below a window and your installation is started.

Welcome

This is a welcome page which shown an overview of the installation process. There are different sections. You need to enter valid information and click on next. It is easy to install Wizard Driven Installation.

License Agreement

Read License Agreement and click Next to progress further.

Requirements Check

MyBB installer checks all necessary requirement like PHP Version, Supported DB Extension, PHP XML extensions, etc. See the image below.

Database Configuration

Enter details like Database Engine, Hostname, Username and Password created in the above steps. If you want you can change table pre-fix, else leave it as is.