How much knowladge do you need to manage a forum?

Do I need to know PHP?
thanks,
sam12

To manage a forum you don't need to know anything about programming. Everything is done in a clean admin interface. To modify it you do need to know a little PHP. Depending on how much you want to change it, you may need to know more advanced PHP.

To add on to this, I was wondering about forum software. I am with GoDaddy (yes, yes, I know, I hear you) and the forum software (Community Server) they have, I think, sucks so far. Can't modify enough stuff for my liking. If anyone has experience with this software, or knows any others out there, please let me know.

phpBB is the best free option available. It's okay - not as powerful as vBulletin but sufficient for a basic forum. I find the admin panel to be really simplistic compared to the vBulletin one. There are a lot of things you can't do. I haven't instaled it myself recently but when I did it a few years ago I don't recall it being much of a problem.

For modifying forum sotware, it depends on what you want to do. Most of the modifications I've done here are on the HTML templates so that was easy. In vBulletin the templates are all manage through the admin interface so that makes it even easier. With phpBB you have to go into the file structure and find what you need to change there.

Before developing any extra features youreself you should check out what's available as add-ons. vBulletin has a really simple plugin management system now which makes it easy to add extra features.

Otherwise, if you want to add extra functionality, you would need to know PHP and mySQL.

Thanks Megan. It gives me some more options to check out. I did figure out that I cannot customize the look of my forums because it was installed through a web installer through Godaddy (so I can't see the file structure or modify any code), not manually. So, I might spend a few hours one day "breaking things" to see if I can install it manually, thus giving me the options I'm looking for.

I also meant to mention punBB. Which is open source, modular, and fully standards compliant (something that the others claim to be but aren't). If I was starting a new forum I would consider using this one.

Checking it out now, thanks!