Set up a working phpBB installation

You will need to set up a working phpBB installation. I suggest you set up a new phpBB board for the sole purpose of designing and testing new templates and styles, that way you won’t risk messing up your own forum. It will need its own directory on the server as well as its own database. Free phpBB hosts that do not give you FTP access will not work, you need a regular hosting account or use the method described below. Again, I won’t go through this in any more detail so please refer to the documentation available at phpbb.com and elsewhere.

Ensure easy access to your template files

The best way to work when creating templates for phpBB is to have set up your own web server in such a way that you edit the files directly in your editor and make changes to the files in the web server’s web root directory without having to upload them manually with your FTP client. Some FTP clients, one of them being SmartFTP, allow you to edit files on the server. The way this works is the FTP client downloads the file, opens with your software and every time you save the file, the FTP client detects it and uploads the file back on the server. This works great when you edit one file at a time but when editing several files it soon becomes a bottleneck.

Once again, I will not cover how you configure your own web server locally; there are several tutorials online that explain the process. See this Wikipedia article for information on running a local server on your Windows machine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAMP

There are also application packages available on the Internet that automate the whole set up process making it a snap.

If you cannot configure a local web server, don’t worry, you can still use the edit feature in your FTP client to edit files remotely. You can also edit them locally and then upload them to the server and overwrite the old files. This works perfectly but takes more time than working with files locally.