• First off, make the actual smilies. Typically each smilie should be a 16×16 gif file. They can be animated. It helps if the file name is the same as the emotion the emoticon is expressing.
• Upload the smiles to the “images/smilies” directory of your phpBB installation.
• Log into the admin panel for phpBB.
• Click on the “Posting” tab.
• Click on “Smilies” in the left hand menu.

If you’re only adding a few smilies
If you’re only adding a few smilies, it’s probably fastest to do this individually through the phpBB interface. Click the “Add multiple smilies” button at the bottom of the page. You’ll then be taken to a page where you can select any image in the “smilies” directory and assign it a shortcode.

Hint: It’s best to create a shortcode surrounded by colons or some other marker to distinguish them from regular text, like :smile: If you just use a word, like “smile,” then anytime a visitor uses the word “smile” in a post it will be replaced by the emoticon.

If you’re adding several smilies
If you’re adding several smilies, it’s faster to create a .pak file that will import all the settings at once. You can create the proper file using Dave’s and Mykee’s *.pak Generator for phpBB 3.xx that’s hosted on RapidShare. (Click the green button in the middle of the page to download. I think they make it confusing on purpose.) According to this forum post you need VB6 runtime installed for it to work.

If you want the emoticons to show up on the right side of the screen when people are writing a post, be sure to uncheck the “Hide” checkbox on the left. Otherwise visitors will have to click a link under the regular emoticons to get a pop-up showing the extra emoticons, which sounds like a total pain. Check the “Click here!” box and you will be prompted to choose the directory that has your emoticon images. Your code will then be populated in the white box. Click the “Generate File” button to save the .pak file.

If the generator doesn’t work for you, you can make the .pak file by hand. Each line in the .pak file gives phpBB instructions on how to insert the emoticon in this format:

ImageFileName, ImageWidth, ImageHeight, Show on posts screen (0 or 1), Emotion, Shortcode

So an example line from my .pack file looked like this:

'angry.gif', '23', '19', '1', 'angry', ':angry:', 

Upload the .pak file to the “smilies” directory on your server which also includes all the smilie images. Go back to the Posting -> Smilies screen in the admin panel and click the “Install smilies package” link at the top right of the page. Your .pak file should be available to select from the dropdown. Select how you want to handle duplicate files. If you select the “Delete All” option, you will delete all other emoticons from the listings, whether they are duplicates or not. The images will still be on the server, they just won’t be listed. When you’re ready, click “Install smilies package.” That’s it! The smilies will now be active.

If you happen to accidentally delete the default smilies (not that I would ever do that), you can reimport them by selecting “smilies.pak” from the dropdown. If that’s missing from your installation, you can download the default emoticon pak here.

If you ever need to edit and delete smilie, this can also be done on the Postings -> Smilies page.

Have fun, and don’t forget to smile while you’re at it!

Sometimes you can get around this by using the news host’s IP address amended with a folder that includes the user name for the hosting account. Such a link would look something like this: 128.128.128.128/~myusername However, not all hosts are set up like that. Some require that you have the domain pointing to the host before you can access the account via the web. Unfortunately, you don’t want to point the domain to the new host before the new blog is set up, and you can’t set up the blog until the domain points there, locking you in an endless loop.

There is a way to escape, though! You can edit the hosts file on your computer. Before daring to do this, be sure to back up a copy of the file. It’s not something you want to screw up. Your hosts file is located in a different location depending on your operating system and edition. This Wikipedia entry tells you where it’s located. I use a Windows machine, so that’s the process I’ll explain.

Windows doesn’t want you accidentally mucking around in your hosts file, so you have to open your text editor with admin privileges. To do that, right-click on the Notepad icon in your start menu and click “Run as administrator.” Then open the hosts file from the location linked to above. You might need to select “All files (*.*)” from the drop-down to be able to see the file in the list. Your hosts file should look something like this:

Editing this file will tell your computer (and only your computer) to look for the domain at an IP address of your choosing. Do this by entering the IP address of the site and then the domain name in the format displayed in the file. Hit save. That’s it! You don’t know the site’s IP address? It should have been listed in your host’s welcome email. If not, ask customer support for it.

Now when you visit the domain in question you should be pointed to your new site. You might need to clear your browser cache before you’ll get this result, or you can open up a different browser where the site isn’t cached and visit the domain there. You should be able to set up WordPress now just as if the domain were already pointing to the new site. No one else will see it until you update the domain servers via your registrar.

This can save you a lot of hassles because you can include the proper domain name in all the site settings instead of having to substitute it with the temporary IP address link which you’d have to change back after launch. Once your site is ready to launch, remove the new line from your hosts file or just comment it out. It’s pretty easy and it saves you a lot of trouble!

This feature is particularly popular among food bloggers who frequently post pictures in their entries. Here is an example screenshot of the plug-in taken from a client’s site, Simply Sugar and Gluten Free:

The downside? Bloggers don’t necessarily want all of their posts to appear in the LinkWithin widget. One client of mine manages events, sponsored reviews, and site pages in WordPress that she doesn’t want to promote at the bottom of her posts. Looking around the LinkWithin site, no solution to this problem is listed, nor did they respond to my request for help.

However, I was able to find my own solution after I realized LinkWithin operates similarly to a search engine. It indexes your site to generate a listing of posts and has to update this index regularly to include your latest posts. You can control what parts of your site a search engine indexes by creating a robots.txt file on your site. You can get more complete information on robots.txt here, but for our purposes, all you have to do is create a file titled robots.txt in the root directory of your web server with this information in it:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

User-agent: LinkWithin
Disallow: /directory-or-pages-you-want-to-hide-from-LinkWithin/
Allow: /

The first block of code says that it’s ok for any search engine to index your site. The second block then tells the LinkWithin spider not to index anything in the page or directory listed after the “Disallow:” text. You can add as many Disallow lines as you want, either to hide specific pages, or to hide any pages within a directory. If you want to disallow a directory, but want to include one specific page in that directory, first disallow the directory and then add the specific page to the Allow: line.

I hope this helps anyone who’s run into this problem with the LinkWithin plug-in. Happy blogging!