Simple message posting

Hitoshi

Ok, I have a fully working, login, register, and users can view their own stats and modify their infomation. Now i'm ready for the next step, message boards. I was wondering if anybody could give me some tips as where to start? how many tables I will need and how to fit them together.. for now, plz stick to the most basic thing possible. I really dont want to go the phpbb route and I gotta do this on my own. I have gotten quite a lot better with PHP and I just need some guidance at this point. once up, i'm sure i can make it a little more advanced.

I'd just like to have logged in users able to post a topic, and have posts inside of topics(replys). Posts and topics also to say who they were written by.

I would really like some help with this. Please no pre-made type packages.

Thanks.

planetsim

First things first, i usually make a function that checks if a user is logged returning true (yes) or false (no). You may want to use that.

Secondly i use 3 tables
Forum (Categories, Forum)
Posts (holds message, hidden user info)
Threads (thread info, forumid, etc)

The forum structure on figuring out if its a category or not has a feild called parentid

-1 is category and if its e.g. 5 its a forum. We get 5 from the categories forumid.

Theres more to it, but it can get a bit more complicated, so ill leave it there. If you want anymore help PM me.

drawmack

I use a completely different approach of one table for each forum.

My table looks like this

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS tblForum
ID            BIGINT             NOT NULL auto_increment,
Title         VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
Parent     BIGINT             NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
Owner     BIGINT             NOT NULL,
Message TEXT                 NOT NULL,
IP            VARCHAR(15)   NOT NULL,
Posted    TIMESTAMP       NOT NULL,
LastPost TIMESTAMP       NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (ID),
INDEX Title     (Title),
INDEX Parent (Parent),
INDEX Owner (Owner),
INDEX Postec (Posted),
INDEX LastPost (LastPost)

this simple table gives me all I need to list the number of posts a use has, give the original creator edit abilities, allow threading of messages and display records in the order they were last posted including replies.