Many people have asked me how to create a custom home page with MyBB. By default, MyBB loads the forum. With a single tweak, you can change MyBB’s default page to something else. This is not the beginning of an April fools joke.

MyBB is widely popular forum software that is used by many sites online. With that said, there are plenty of sites where the forum is not the focus of the site. So it makes sense to change the home page to something else.

If your hosting is running Apache then it’s a rather easy one line change.

As some of you may know, our home page is actually the MyBB portal page. We use MyBB to power every page such as our MyBB themes page and even our custom work page.

Change MyBB default page

Change (or create) your .htaccess file to include the following:

DirectoryIndex portal.php index.php

This works for MyBB 1.8 and I believe it does work for MyBB 1.6 as well.

Making it so MyBB loads a different page is not recommended for everyone but like I said in the beginning – it does make sense for some sites.