On his blog, Stoyan Stefanov takes a look at using on of the most popular pieces of PHP forum software out there - phpBB - and optimizing the front-end.

During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we'll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will continue to work normally. As an example, I'll use the bgcanada.com/phpBB2, the board I volunteer to administrate.

The tutorial is broken up into sections:

• The plan
• New subdomains
• Creating a new template
• Moving CSS to an external file, merging
• Copying files to the new subdomains
• Serving gzipped content
• Turning ETags off
• Expires header
• Sysadmin summary

It looks like a lot of steps, but each section is relatively short and written well so as not to have more information than needed. In the end you'll have a simple template that uses Yahoo's 14 optimization rules to make things work that much faster.