Need Basic Idea

[Anon]

I've been asked to build a web-based interface to News (NNTP), with the equivalent functionality to the web forums. Basic need is
list available newsgroups
allow users to select a newsgroup
list all items in a newsgroup
allow users to read individual news items
display news postings in a threaded fashion, that is, show the relationship between items, as we can see in the overview in
phorum (the web forum software). The best way to implement this is to use some sort of dynamic data structure.
To gain a credit or above, you must use some kind of system to separate logic from content.
Users should be able to subscribe to groups, as with most newsreaders such as NN. This means your software will have to:
Let users log in with a username and password
For each user, track which groups they have subscribed to
For each group a user has subscribed to, not display articles they have already read.
I need a basic idea about how to do.

Hoping to get some help.......

Yours
Vivek

[[deleted]]

Start by reading the NTTP RFC.
The read about PHP's socket functions.
You can startup a simple socket connection to the news server and send/receive commands.

Tricky thing to look out for:
the NNTP protocol ends some messages with a single dot '.' on a line.
If you miss that line, or you are not looking out for it, your script will hang for quite a while...