Hey guys. I need some help from all of you out there. My wife bought me my own website for Christmas, and I'm wanting to create a forum ( nothing of course that would rival bfarber.com ) just a forum for some of our closest friends, so that we can post about when our kids's b-day parties are, and the next group get togethers. So nothing big. But I'm not sure how to go about setting it ( the forum ) up. Can you please help me????

Some hosts actually offer installers (one click installs) for PHP-Nuke forums. Or you can install the whole PHP-Nuke site. A host I know for sure that has those features is http://serverfly.com

There are two approaches:

1. Get a free forum that is hosted elsewhere and link to that from your site. Search for "free forums" on google and you will see a large list of free forum providers. This is probably more than adequate for your needs. The downside is that you will probably not be able to move the forum elsewhere later on.

2. Get a free forum provided by your host. I recommend Cpanel with Fantastico panel (this is what bfarber.com is using). In the fantastico autoinstaller, you will be able to see a list of free forum scripts including IPB 1.3. and PHPBB. You may also opt for a content management system such as PHPnuke, PostNuke etc. The host that we are using right now is www.hostito.com and it would have all the features you need.