Simple Machines Forum - SMF in short - is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your forum and with our unique SSI - or Server Side Includes - function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other. SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database.

You can add extra functionality to your SMF forum by installing Mod's to your forum. These Mod's are packages that can change your forum's operation, add features, remove features, and a lot of other possibilities.

These packages can be downloaded from the SMF "Mod Site". Once you have downloaded the required package you need to login to the Admin section of your SMF forum and navigate to
Admin > Packages > Download Packages

Bulletin Board Codes or BBCodes are a way to format posts in SMF, and also in many other forum software.

The general format of a BBCode has three parts, an opening tag, the inside content and a closing tag, as shown below:

[open]      text inside      [/close]
[b]         bold text        [/b]

You can easily change the appearance of your SMF forum using the Theme Manager in the Admin area of your forum. There are many themes available for download from the SMF website as well as 3rd party sites. Just do a search using your favourite search engine to find a theme that suits your needs.