building a forum

bluelight

I plan on building a forum much like this one where students at my school can trade and sell text books. I am familiar with html, but know nothing about php or javascrip,etc.
My question to the forum users is are there any templates/tutorials out there that can help me build a forum? (Is it worth taking the time to learn php?) I was browsing and heard a lot about vBulletin, kind of expensive since I don’t have any sponsorship. Any similar programs out there that are cheaper or free? Thanks in advance.

Pig

Learning an entire programming language for a simple bb is not a good trade off unless you want to learn anyway. check out phpbb.

eoghain

The software that this board is running is called phpbb. There is also phourm which is another php based forum software. Both of these are open source projects I believe.

You should also go look at sourceforge.net for other open source solutions. Don't bother re-inventing the wheel. Especially if you are just learing.

Pig

No. This forum is vBulletin.

eoghain

Oops, getting my fourm software confused sorry.

bluelight

thanks for all the help guys im checking out phpbb🙂

planetsim

There is also Invision Board. Which i think is better than PHPBB.

If you do however think you wanna learn PHP.
Forums arent really that hard. Time Consuming yes. But anyone who knows the basic MySQL Functions. While Loops arrays etc in PHP shouldnt have any troubles in making a small forum.

n00854180t

I have found PHPBB2 to be better than Invision...