3 Ways to Pimp Your Fireboard

With free and commercial integrations of phpBB3 planned for Joomla 1.5, we're soon going to have several excellent forum extensions available for Joomla.

However, for Joomla 1.0 Fireboard is still the best and easiest option. Here are three great ways to spice up your Fireboard installation:

1) Shorten Long URLs so They Don't Break the Forum

The Truncate Mambot does a great job of shortening URLs so they don't push out the sides of the forum. If you register on their site and login, the mambot download reveals itself.

2) Use the Greatest Latest Posts Module

WastedZombie.com might have an eye-poppingly bad design, but their Ultimate Forum Top Ten module is far superior to any alternative. It has a huge range of options from the usual date and time to Javascript previews of the posts and a very smooth avatar integration.

3) Provide RSS Feeds for Your Categories

FBFeed is a separate component that provides configurable feeds for your forum. You can mix and match as many categories as you want to create feeds.

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Your Comments (6)

Anthony Olsen

December 21, 2007

Thanks for that Steve ... the long urls were really messing with my template.

Any dangers with overuse with the rssfeeds component?

Steve Burge

December 21, 2007

Hi Anthony

Me too until I found it Should be part of the next core release, I hope.

Google just announced it won't index feeds, but just to be safe and for MSN and Yahoo, you can always use robots.txt to deindex them.

Aria Rajasa

December 26, 2007

Nice tips, just been using fireboard for a while (1.0 that is) and it leaps of feature are just ecstatic!

Bernard

January 14, 2008

Steve, you mention integrations of phpBB3 for J1.5 to come. Do you think it isn't a good idea to start a new J1.5 site with Fireboard?

dateson

March 17, 2008

@Bernard, for now Fireboard not working yet with J1.5 (maybe at ver 2.0).

Pork

April 21, 2008

fireboard works with joomla! 1.5 just use Legacy mode.