Advice on free chat and forum apps plz

yeleth

Hello, I'n new here. I've been looking for an online gaming site for RPG chat games but can't find what I want, for the style of game I want. So I'm thinking of putting up my own site. I need both chat and a forum. People need to play their game in the chat, discuss it it out of game time in the forum and advertise actual games running in the forums.

I've done ASP (so I understand the principles of PHP) and can do HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL on Windoz but I've only dipped into PHP/Linux.

Q1: Is it best to install this PHP/Apache/mySQL on Linux (given that my actual final server will be Linux anyway and I'd like to mirror my server with my dev server at home?

Q2: Should I hunt around the web in Google or go to sourceforge and hunt there (or both)?

RossC0

Not too sure how you're going to run the game in a chat window - but I guess you are! So can't really advise on a php Chat class / application.

As for the forums - there are a number out there! phpBB, vBulletin, IPB etc...

If you want to setup your own website with these functions in there are some good CRM opensource solutions out there:

Look up:
i.e. Mambo, Xoops, phpNuke
All are well supported and provide login security and various functions (i.e. intergrated forums, chat applications etc.. ) to provide a feature rich website, quickly and generally easily 😉

Regarding your own localhost - most solutions will work on both Linux and windows - so no worries there, you will have to change config files when copying across to a live server anyway, so use whatever you have already or are most comfortable in.

There are apache / mysql / php packages available for easy install - check out LAMP, WAMP and easyPHP on google or get the components individually and install manually...