Display forum topics on website

[ExpertBeginner]

MOVED FROM COFFEE LOUNGE:

Just wondered if any people who manage forums could help me:

I have a website for a band i play in, and an external forum. I would like to know how i can get my website to display the latest topics and announcements from the forum - similar to 'Recent Forum Topics', or 'Popular Discussions' on the front page on www.linuxforums.org

I really like the way its done at the host site for the forum I'm a moderator of:

theska.co.uk

I can't get the link to the forum to work with and it hyperlinks it automatically as an incorrect url if i paste it as text, in fact it does this inside [quote] and [code] as well.

I typed it below, with gaps so it displays correctly, and also pasted it without gaps so you can see what i mean:

http : // www . ska2 . com /forum /viewforum .php? f=33

http://www.ska2.comforum-33.html

EDIT: I have contacted the admin at the site that host my forum, but they are not much help! Also I'm not experienced in server side scripting like PHP, Pearl, etc so any links to scripts I can steal would be usefull

[jasonlambert]

we use ezPortal from http://smartor.is-root.com/viewtopic.php?t=1860

[Reisswolf]

I did not know about the existence of the mod.

The other day I was trying to do the same--display recent posts on my main web page. I checked the phpbb tables and found that the table that stores the posts is called "phpbb1_posts_text." Then I tried writing my own SQL to extract the most recent rows from that table. But try as I might, I could not connect to the database. I was absolutely sure that I was supplying the correct user name and password, but I still kept getting an error message saying that I had no permission to connect.

Does anyone know why we cannot query the tables directly?