I'm just working on a simple phpBB style forum, just for fun really, I'm not planning on opening it up to the web. I'm sort of new to programming and this is just a beginning project, sort of thing.

So I'm doing the research and development on my own but I'm wondering about some project questions. This site uses phpBB, right? Is it pure phpBB, or is there a bunch of other stuff you had to do (custom forms, news pages, etc). I ask because I'm just not sure at this point how far phpBB can go for me. I want to develop a working site but I'm wondering, at what point does phpBB's functionality stop?

This forum is phpBB2. It's heavily modified, however. We have the following this integrated in: News, Source Coder, Archives, Anti-Bot Registration, jsTIfied, SAX and more. Some of our stuff may have started as phpBB add ons but for the most part everything is custom tailored (such as SAX and anti-bot registration).

As comic said, we started from phpBB as a forum and templating engine, and built the rest of the site (including, most importantly, a lot of custom security patches) on top of it. If you're looking for a modern forum and/or CMS, though, I'm not sure phpBB is the best choice for you. What do you want to be able to do?

Which of those did you build?

I built the news archives system, SourceCoder, the archives, jsTIfied, and SAX. Elfprince13 built the anti-bot system. Tari, elfprince, tifreak8x, Merthsoft, and others have contributed to the various tweaks and fixes that keep everything running smoothly. comic was responsible for implementing the mobile theme and has been maintaining it.