v1.2 Installation
v1.2 • Installation • Configuration • Troubleshooting
Disclaimer
Be warned, installing M2F is NOT easy! You have to be very careful and remember always to do a full backup of your site before installation. Small mistakes can easily cause phpBB to stop working.
Having said that, there are a lot of installations world-wide (As of 2007, more than 15.000 downloads!), so after the backup go ahead and try it out 
Requirements
- phpBB 2.0.x (Latest 2.0.22 is supported)
- PHP version 4.3.5 or later, including PHP 5.
- MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
An note that you also have to have a clue about this:
- Some way to send emails. Supported methods (pick one):
- PHP’s mail() function
- Sendmail (which must be running on the local server)
- SMTP - you need a login and a password for a SMTP server (you are usually offered this as part of an email address service)
- Supported methods to import emails (pick one):
- POP3 - you need a login and a password for a POP3 server (you are often offered this as part of an email address service, although m2f does not currently support the popular IMAP system which some email hosts use)
- Mbox - emails can be read from a text file in the mbox format, located somewhere in the server’s filesystem, readable by your webserver. (Advanced users only)
- Stdin - emails, instead of being stored by an email server, can be piped in to m2f via command-line PHP. Thus each email is imported automatically as soon as it is received by the server (Advanced users only - Not recommended).
- Gmail account - you need a working Gmail account and M2F will use it to get new messages. (Note: as of 16-nov-2007 Gmail support has been reported broken in this thread)
- If you want to enable attachment support, you must also install Acydburn’s AttachMod
- An external mailing list (mailman , majordomo, yahoogroups, etc.) can be used, but is not necessary. It is easy to set up a mailing list using M2F.
Installation
If you already installed phpBB you must follow these steps (Recommended):
- Backup your site and database: If you do not know how, you should ask for support in phpBB forums.
- Download the latest stable v1.x version of M2F, which is advertised on the homepage .
- Copy the entire M2F folder to the root of your phpBB installation. For example, if your phpBB is installed in a directory named phpBB2/, copy the M2F folder to phpBB2/m2f.
- Copy all the files under the m2f/root folder to their corresponding locations in your phpBB directory. For example, copy the files in phpBB2/m2f/root/admin/ to phpBB2/admin/.
- Now, follow the instructions located in m2f/m2f_phpbb20x.txt. You may skip the COPY section.
- Rename or copy the file phpBB2/m2f/m2f_config.php.dist to phpBB2/m2f/m2f_config.php. You may optionally edit it to your liking. The default configuration should work fine.
If you have not installed phpBB yet, then follow these steps:
- Download and install phpBB 2.0.22 (Get it here)
- Download and install the Attach Mod (Get it here)
- Be sure that phpBB is working, post something and play around with attachments.
- Download premodded files (pick one of these):
- Unzip the file’s contents on the phpBB home directory, overwriting existing files.
- Rename or copy the file phpBB2/m2f/m2f_config.php.dist to phpBB2/m2f/m2f_config.php. You may optionally edit it to your liking. The default configuration should work fine.
Some post-install notes:
- The SQL database tables will be automatically created using default values the first time the M2F script is run.
- You have to log-in to phpBB’s Admin-CP and configure M2F. More on that on the configuration page.
