I'm sick of hearing about all of these pre-made forums and people asking how to set them up. When will someone finally code their own forum. Right now, everyone is using the same codes and eventually the whole internet will look exactly the same. If you have ever coded your own forum, please post here. It will make me feel much better.
I hate pre-made forums
I coded a forum a few years back (4-5) in asp, haven't bothered in php. I think allot of the people you speak of aren't necessarily php developers. Most php developers know how to read instructions and setup php applications, its people who aren't really interested in the how that find following instructions difficult.
As for everyone building there own forums. No point in reinventing the wheel, I only built mine as a learning process.
thorpe wrote:As for everyone building there own forums. No point in reinventing the wheel, I only built mine as a learning process.
Same here. I build one in ASP and then another a few years later in C#.NET and it was mainly for learning. And I learned a lot. I still remember the day I put my first forum on the net and asked all these tech people to break it and they hacked it to death. Most of what I know about web security spawned from that week.
I made my own forum entirely using AJAX. Unfortunately, it sucked big time.
However, it was only an experiment to see whether it would work. Visually, it was terrible, and the AJAX usage meant that the "back" button didn't work as expected.
There was really no reason for doing that, it was only an experiment. It only had a few features.
Mark
Mark, you can use anchors now to get beyond the back issues...of course, it doesn't solve the must have javascript issue. Over the weekend I hacked together a photo gallery thing using the anchor and now every image has a permalink...and I could build and array of 'backs' if I felt like it.
CSS is for customizing forums. It's a pain but it can be done. I can't remember which one now (miniBB?), but recently I needed to hack the thing up big time to make it look good. It has a good structure as I was able to really get in there and control the look and even layout of things - editing the layout templates in addition to adding custom CSS rules. It's possible...it was better than writing one from scratch for the moment...
phpshift wrote:I... and eventually the whole internet will look exactly the same.
Personally I think the reason for the consistent layout and look of forums is because that is what people expect to see; that's what they're used to. Heck when we upgraded the boards here at PHPBuilder it caused a huge ruckus because things looked different, and people couldn't find what they wanted. And we're a technically savvy bunch. Imagine if you created a completely new-looking forum for dog lovers (that barely could get on the internet and maybe had seen a "forum" once or twice before) - imagine the resistance you'd get to that site because it would cause people to go outside their internet comfort zone.
Unless you're running a site that allows the design to be more avant-garde, it's generally not a good idea to go WAY out of the box... youll just confuse your users and make them work, many of whom are lazy bastards that would rather click away.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying innovation is bad, I'm just saying people in general are resistant to change so you have to take baby steps).
Just my 2 cents 
In a way I feel phpshift's pain. Generally, we expect this forum to be about writing code in PHP. So, a plethora of questions about "how do I install $foo" can really turn your stomach in a jiff.
I suppose my best answer for the situation is: run up a high post count, occasionally answer a question so it appears you know what you're doing, put a bunch of FAQ links in your .sig, and then generally act aloof.
Speaking of "aloof", anyone care to divulge your PM rate for the contacts of the "you don't know me but I saw you on PHPBuilder and thought you were a cool person who could answer this question" type? I think I'm down to less than 10 annually....
Really, it just bothers me that nobody wants to learn anymore. If you are going to use only premade codes, that's fine. But if you say you know PHP and that you're learning, why stop at the hard parts? I just want to find people who are willing to go the extra mile to make their site better than others.
phpshift wrote:I just want to find people who are willing to go the extra mile to make their site better than others.
I don't really agree with that. If somebody has a site and they want to add a forum to it, they could code their own forum, or they could use a ready-made forum script. Using a pre-made forum is much more convenient. Besides, there are countless people who examine and code these pre-made forums, and the code is being consistently updated and renewed. Bugs are discovered because many people use them. However, if you code your own forum script for your site, chances are you will miss out on some important bugs, flaws, and security breaches. For somebody who just wants to maintain a site, going through the headache of trying to find these bugs is too difficult and inefficient. Likely, this person would end up coding a sub-standard forum script with fewer features. This site won't be better than others.
<<where's the @#$@#$ delete button these days??>>
Press the any key.
I'm sorry I keep complaining about things. I'm kinda stressed right now because my new site doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
17 days later
Ok, after a while, I actually decided to attempt making my own forum. The thing about this forum though is that it doesn't use any MySQL, it's completely flatfile. If you want to see it, it's at http://message.phpshift.info
P.S. I don't really mind pre-made forums, I was just stressed. Sorry about that.
I coded my own forum about three weeks ago.
We were using myBB on a site, but needed to fully integrate the forums into all else we were doing.
I look at about six or seven forums under the hood and really liked: getvanilla. Elegant code. Made with OOp.
My forums are very, very, very simple, but I am happy with all that I learned making them. (mostly by tearing apart the code of mybb, getvanilla, bbpress, and another I forgot now...)
edit: We also didn't want or need:
avatars
private messages
or all the other bells and whistles
We wanted a basic tool to allow users to discuss issues. Our audience is very, very computer illiterate, with several older folks in their fifties and sixties. Some forums have sooooo much going on that our audience were intimidated.
(I hesitate to post the URL for fear of all you experts hacking it apart, LOL!!! But if you want to see it, let me know...)
Well, I sent the link to phpshift, so I might as well invite more feedback from you all.
Afterall, you guys are the ones from whom I learn. Just please don't hack it to death, LOL!
It is made with three tables for the forums:
forums: for the forum name and description
topics: for the discussion "threads" or "topics" of discussion
posts: the actual posts
We have some folks who are not used to computers, older, and who would rather be out being active, so the system had to be as minimal and user-friendly for non-geeks as possible.
Let me know if you all have suggestions.
Thanks.
It's very well made. I like it a lot. I hope my forum comes out even nearly as good as yours.