1. Seeing how the blog doesn't have a comment function, may I suggest creating one thread per (new) blog post here, then link to them at the bottom of the blog posts, so people can write comments and contribute to the site in this way.
2. Currently, it seems forum posts need to be approved by the administrator before being published. I of course understand that this is necessary to protect the forum from spam, but it's also somewhat inconvenient. Maybe this system could be replaced with some kind of spam protection extension instead? This might also reduce the work that needs to be done by the admin to keep spam out.
Depending on what's okay for the admin, internal spam processing could be used, or you could rely on external services such as Akismet or hCaptcha, for which phpBB extensions exist.
What do you think?