TunaBB is a bulletin board designed from scratch to be self-contained, easy to deploy, easy to customize and easy to extend. It attempts not to use sessions, and requires users to enter their username and password every time they want to reply to a thread (a topic), create a new topic, etc.
The main idea behind TunaBB is that it should be ready-to-go (almost) as soon as you are finished downloading it. It doesn't have any dependencies aside from what PHP already includes (except you are missing something or have an extension disabled), and it doesn't require you to use PHP package managers, or configure much stuff. Batteries included. Canned software! (ba dum tss!)
To install TunaBB, clone this repository and extract the TunaBB in the root of your webserver (or wherever you want the forum to be). In my case this is /var/www/html, as I'm using Apache on Ubuntu.
Then, make sure you have the sqlite3 extensions for PHP enabled. I had to run sudo apt-get install php-sqlite3 to install them and uncomment extension=sqlite3 in my php.ini file. You might have to do the same, or add the extension to the the ini file, or something else, depending on your distro.
Then, create a directory outside of your webserver directories to store the TunaBB database. It's an SQLite database, so if you choose to store it in your webserver folder it will be exposed to the internet and that's very dangerous. Don't! In my case, I chose to create /etc/tunabb, and that's the default directory TunaBB attempts to use.
sudo mkdir /etc/tunabb
Then, you'll have to set the permissions for this folder. In my case, as I'm using Apache on Ubuntu, I had to set the permissions for the www-data user, that is the user Apache uses. To do so, I ran:
sudo chown www-data:www-data /etc/tunabbsudo chgrp www-data /etc/tunabbsudo chmod 775 /etc/tunabb
Then, you'll have to set the permissions for the TunaBB folder in your webserver. Otherwise, TunaBB won't be able to upload user avatars and topic icons. Since I had installed TunaBB to /var/www/html/forum, to do so, I had to run:
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/forumsudo chgrp www-data /var/www/html/forumsudo chmod 775 /var/www/html/forum
Once that is done, point your browser to www.your-forum-url.com/forum/initialize.php, assuming your domain URL is www.your-forum-url.com and that you extracted TunaBB to a forum directory in the root of your webserver. Your actual values might differ. The initialize.php file will set up the avatars directory, where the user avatars are stored, the icons director, where the topic icons are stored, and the TunaBB database.
Once you've ran the initializer, you might want to delete initialize.php so nobody else can access it.
Next, you'll have to configure TunaBB! (or you may choose to do that before installing TunaBB, in case you want to change the where TunaBB installs the database).
Everything that's supposed to be configured by the user is in the config.php file. Every setting is explained within that very file.
If you want to customize the TunaBB theme, modify the theme.css in the stylesheets directory. If you use another premade theme (such as theme-thin.css or theme-wide.css), bear in mind that TunaBB will use the one called theme.css, so you might have to rename the one you want to use.
To add administrator accounts, add them to the admins.php file. The syntax is add_admin("admin_username");, obviously replace admin_username for whatever the username of the user you want to set as admin is. You can have as many administrators as you want.
To create categories, point your browser to the admin_portal.php panel and choose an option there.
Deleting categories, posts, topics, closing topics and banning users are planned features, but for the time being you can solve them using simple SQL queries.
The TunaBB source code has been created by Lartu is released under the MIT License for everybody to use. Most images you see on the default site have been created by Lartu. These are property of Lartu and are not released under the MIT License. The default page background, however, has been shamelessly stolen from the Dreampipe Bulletin Board (that, in turn, inspired TunaBB) and the default topic icon included is the My PC icon from Windows 95, property of Microsoft.