I want my own Forums

Alexj17

I am very new at php and want my own forums, i want to know where to start, what i need, baseacally anything on what to do?

lol!!!

Thanks

Alexj17

raymie

try www.phpbb.com

planetsim

a total php newbie wont have any idea on how hard it is to build a Forum. I made one. Its taken my 1month so far. I put it on the web. And found many errors i couldnt get to before.

There are way to many things to look after in a Forum. You have the forums themselves. Then people registered. I showed people online, and stuff. Then you need sessions and cookies, giving people the choice.

You wanna have BBcode. You must make it up.

Theres alot lot more. But the thing is its very very time consuming. You should know alot in PHP before you try and attempt it. I tried not using OO and i found its extremely hard. Im not giving up though. But im sure gonna learn more OO and update the code.

ThoughtRiot

I'm building a forum that uses no SQL (all files). I have been working on it for about a week now, and hope to finish within a few days. After that if anyone here wants the source, I will gladdly hand it over, you can use it to learn how to make your own forum, or just use it right on your site (customized of course).

Take Care
~ThoughtRiot

planetsim

ThoughtRiot, i hope you dont expect too many visitors at that board. txtfile db's are good until it comes to large applications. I hate to say this but forums are large applications. txtfiles slow the server down. So if you have big images files. You do not just have to parse through them but also the txt files to find the posts. It will get too big in the end. Sooner or later it will stop functioning as well when new. Try posting 1000posts in it. Before that have a timer to count how long it takes to do it all. Then keep adding posts. You'll notice it will change quite a bit.

Try using a SQL one. txtfiles will just make things too slow

BuzzLY

Alex, if you are completely new to PHP, I would recommend you go someplace like EZBoard to create your board. That will give you the experience of setting up and running a board. In the meantime, learn a little about PHP, and get an Apache/PHP/MySQL server running. Once you do that, download PHPBB and install it on your Apache server. It's not too difficult, but unless you understand a few things about Apache and PHP, you may have trouble.

It will be a good learning experience for you, though 🙂

Good Luck!

ThoughtRiot

Well, im going to update it for SQL eventualy...but for your first part the sweet thing is I'm gonna call it "BareBBS" (heh), it won't have many features. The only images in it is the site logo, which is just a standard image tag. And yes it may not be to stable, but until I get more users, then this will do...and its mainly for experience. Thanks for the input. Taken.

Take Care
~ThoughtRiot

raymie

If you keep using files then I would consider carefully how you plan to deal with concurrent replies to the same topic.

dalecosp

Alex,

BuzzLY has given some good advice. If you want to make your own, go ahead, but phpBB is top notch, almost as good as (some would say better than) vbulletin, which is what we're talking on here. vbulletin costs $xxx ($xxxx?), too. The problem is that you have to have, at a bare minimum, database access, and probably something better than just ftp access on the server. I think you'd be very happy with phpBB if you can meet or exceed those requirements.

dalecosp