Portal suggestions needed

[Rick_M71]

I am setting up a new site and I want to make sure I keep a portal home page that is compatible with phpbb3 seo.

Are there any portals that are good to use with phpbb3 seo? If not, which of the following is the best approach:

1. Set up my forums in the main directory and use the recent threads mod to at least show the most recent activity on the home page, even if it doesn't show snippets of the most recent threads.

2. Set up my forums in a subdirectory and leave the main directory relatively empty while waiting for a good seo portal page to be developed?

I don't want to launch the site only to have my urls all messed up when I want to change things around.

Thanks for you advice!

[dcz]

Well, you could run a portal with phpBB at the same level as well.

So far, no portal script was officially patched, but most should at least work in simple and mixed mode (thanks to the forum url cache), at least if they use the append_sid() function proper.

The problem is phpBB3 is a bit too new to already have a stable portal, at least I do not know of any so far. But beside, if you find one you like and that seem to be going to be dev for long, you can install it already. It's not a SEO problem if you have unrewritten links at first on the portal page, they will be redirected by the zero duplicate and should be disallowed by robots.txt when using url rewriting.
Extending url rewriting to the portal will be better, but not doing it is not harmful SEO wise (with zero duplicate and proper robots.txt).
If you choose one, let us know, so we can provide a patch.

Installing phpBB in a sub dir really is up to you, can be handy if you plan to install many other things, but as well can be better to keep the urls shorter, especially using the virtual folder option (but the virtual root option can help in such case).

Take the time to test the several option and conditions on a local server, it's worth it, more important than the links on the portal IMHO.

++

[dcz]

Topic splitted : http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb3-mod-rewrite/discussions-vt2030.html