stripping down a pre-made forum...

mutus

Hello,

I have been looking at various free PHP forums. A lot of them look pretty good including phpbb... however that and many others simply have too many features for what I need. Before I go write my own I figured I should ask here first. My situation is this:

THis would not be a public forum, people who access it would already be logged in to a members area, so there would be no need for the forum itself to authenticate users. I would already know who they are. They don't need to have profiles in the forum either.
Forum would not have moderators, just one admin.
It really would not need to be feature-rich if you know what I mean... It's fine, in fact preferable if it does not provide all the functionalities of say a phpbb. Or at least that those features were easily removed.

So while the pre-made forums I explored are quite nice, they are of course designed as stand-alone products ready to go out of the box that handle all the details for you. This is more than I need and it's not immediately obvious to me how to get rid of the authentication, profiles etc. but still use the structure of the forum.

THis is an odd request I know, I probably would be best off writing my own simple custom forum at this point. But before I spend the time I figured it can't hurt to ask if anyone has successfully altered a premade forum to this extent, to fit in with their own site and authentication system.

Thanks kindly for any advice. (BTW I not necessarily looking for a free forum either)

cscscs

the fact that you want it to interface with your current user system, makes the problem quite difficult. you would most likely have a headache trying to get your current user system to work with the forum software's system.

it is my assumption that some of the better (and free) forum packages like invision board, are modular enough so that you can simply disable whatever sections / features you want. you don't have to have mods, for example, it's an option, and simply having it be an option, might not necessarily slow things down.

obviously, the best solution, if you're even considering it, which shows that you must have the time, is to code your own. depending on your skill level, it can be a challenge (it was for me), but it's also rewarding. the other downside is that you can't visit said forum's tech support forum for help when something is buggered up 🙂

i don't know of any barebones forums. there are some that look quite barren (phorum, for example), but i wouldn't expect to find a forum package that doesn't have a user system, for example.

mutus

THanks, that's pretty much what I expected to hear... I will just code my own - it won't need to be very fancy.

I think you are correct in that it would be more trouble to mess around with a premade board than it would be to just code what I want. Especially since I already have authentication in place. That's what I started to realize as I was looking around.

Don't really have the time but I'll have to make time.

Figured it couldn't hurt to ask though what others have done before I venture off.

Thank you kindly for your reply. 🙂

arelgee

I will butt in here and see if anyone has any ideas about what I might need and if anyone has done something similar.
I have decided against a mulitude of forums, but my site is very limited in scope. I need one forum package to handle this.

Penny stock investors
People that want to start their own business
Subsections Programming ie PHPmysql, internet sites, self publishing etc.
People that want to build their own house
Local groups here in San Antonio, colleges, entrepeneur groups, senior citizens etc.

I downloaded phpbb today but haven't looked over it . Does anyone know of a site that uses phpbb or any other that I could look at?
I thought of simply writing a script with name , subject and text but that would be fairly useless, since searching it would be a nightmare. There would be so many different subjects that very few would bother to read any.
What I am thinking is to have 4 main categories(above) with maybe 4 to 6 subsections each. That would be a maximum of 24. Then I would have a subject line of say 6-7 words to search on.
Every month or so, the posts would be purged, all good info would be catalogued and all the fluff erased.
Any help would be appreciated.
arelgee