Building my own forum

fire_cracker

I am looking to design my own forum for my website. I want to do it from scratch to get the expierance, and also that I can totaly customize it to my website and needs. Does anyone know of a good tutorial on doing something like this. I have searched google, and found very little good information. Thanks for any help that you guys can provide me with.

Merve

Start with something like a guestbook for practice. Then once you've figured out how to make a really good guestbook, you can move on to stuff like a small message board, then branch off into a full-fledged forum. You can take a peek at the source code for something like Invision Board along the way.

pjleonhardt

before you embark on a project this big make sure you have experience in cookies/sessions(admin), databases, possibly pagination, and good layout designs..

like Merve said, start with something small..
Like maybe a blog.. or a guestboard..
then add in that ppl need to be users..
then add in multiple topics
then add in searching
then add in othertweaks you want..
etc..

I've been learning PHP for about 6 months now and I keep saying Im going to write my own forum... but I still havent gotten around to it 🙂
I need to learn more about regex for "bbcode" sort of stuff first.

Merve

I'd say that if you want to code your own forum, you need to make it unique. It needs to have something that other forums don't. It needs to have all the features of vB and Invision Board and more...and then some. But don't expect this to happen overnight. Code slowly. Your first forum version will almost definitely be crappy. But slowly, your forum might get better than better...and then you can use it over and over and over again. One thing you need to do if you want to use the script on multiple sites is to make it as portable as possible. Use include() so that all you have to is create a PHP file with all the variables that might change from forum to forum.

pablodelapena

ive coded my own sort of forum. its simple, but the first version was most definatly crappy. its slowly getting better.

but to get back on topic.

for a self coded forum what sorta security issues do you need to watch out for?

pjleonhardt

on user postings...make sure to use strip_tags()

this however wont work if ppl do something like
<scr<script>ipt>
it will take out <script> and leave <script>...
so you might want to put it in a loop until it doesnt find anymore tags...

A reason for this is stuff like making popups on your forums, doing something like
<div style="position: absolute; top:0;left:0; width: 100%; height:100%; background-color: #00000;">

Covering up your entire screen with black, etc..