Posted November 12, 200519 yr Hey guys, I know php and SQL aren't really coding languages, so let's just skip the 'OMFG n00b th1s 4int c0dingz0rs' crap. Me and a friend are going to completely code an entire forum in php. We are doing this for a schoolproject, and we already have webspace from school with a php parser and mySQL support. We started out with making a simple guestbook, and that went pretty well.. But we both know writing an entire forum is alot of work, and there are alot of things we have to take into consideration and that we can't forget. Has any of you ever done something like this before? or could give us some tips or tricks? I know php and SQL for lets say ~70%, and what I don't know I can look up easily enough, so feel free to skip the noobie explanation after every sentence. Thnx in advance if you can give any help.
November 12, 200519 yr A school project? Forums can take months to code, and after those months, you'll have a pretty bad one. Anyway, I started a longterm project, never really finished it. Here's the source: http://www.tech-devil.co.uk/~prometheus/forums2.zip
November 12, 200519 yr Author Yes, I know making a 'good' forum takes months to code.. but we don't want to make it too advanced. We just want to do the basic stuff, like a table with members/accounts, the ability to create new accounts, be able to make threads, post stuff, use smileys, edit your posts, make stickies etc. I don't see why that should be too complex to do. Anyway I'd say we have about 2 months for the school project. And I recon if we put a decent ammount of time into it it should be doable.
November 12, 200519 yr It's easy.. If I can remember PHP (I think I can, since the syntax is very similar to all other languages i use), you can just ask me questions if you need help.
November 12, 200519 yr My friend coded a cool forum in a couple days heres the linky http://samkline.com just click on forums toward the bottom he made this whole site in notepad with mysql php and of course html
November 15, 200519 yr I wrote my own forums in PHP/MySQL for a group of my friends to use with one of their projects. Basically what I did was look at the table setups from IPB and PHPBB to see exactly how they organized the data, then I based my tables off a similar design. I certainly hope you're running apache/mod_php/mysql locally for development, since uploading gets to be quite annoying. :P You might want to check out how to use mod_rewrite as well, keeps your URLs looking clean and pr0.
November 15, 200519 yr Author yeh thnx for tips Asterix, I am running Apache on my machine cuz indeed constantly uploading sux. Now I am using FlashFXP to upload so even that goes quite nicely but still.. And perhaps looking at a sourcecode from already exsisting forum might work well yes.. but I dunno.. It might guarantea for a good forum, but it would feel to me like it wasn't really ours, we just copied it. So I'll sleep a night over that. Anyway thnx for the tips.
November 15, 200519 yr The source code for stuff like PHPBB, IPB, Vbulletin, etc. is designed to run on a variety of setups and configurations (apache, mysql, php all have thousands of possible configuration combinations), so their source code has to take that into account... and it's generally pretty ugly looking. What I meant by table setups was the actual database. After examining how they stored their data, I could piece together mentally how each page would work, and what queries I would have to write to retrieve the data I would need for each type of pageview (index, viewing profile, viewing topic, etc.)
