[RESOLVED] Basic Forum Help!

Muncey

Ok i need a bit of help with my forum... actually i need a lot of help.

Firstly i have all the topic area made, for example when you go into a forum such as "coding" (this current forum) you see the list of topics inside it... i have just a list of topics which belong to no forum as of yet.

So i added on the topics table in my database a forumID field where the forum ID of the forum the topic is in will be stored.

I also added a new table named "forums" and this has fields - ID (int 3, auto increment and primary key), title (the title of the forum, for example the one this topic is in is called coding), the description, topics (how many topics it holds) and posts (how many posts it holds).

Right so as i added the actually area the titles get added into first im finding it very hard to know how to make this main page with categories and forums on which then hold the topic area thing ive already made.

I know the url of each forum will have to include the ID of the forum which will most probably be ?id=(number), and then the topics will have to be linked to that somehow.

Any help at all will be very much appreciated, im really in need of help.

Btw if you need anymore information just ask and ill give you as much as i can.

Thanks in advance

leatherback

Hey Muncey,

Sounds like you started with a bit too big to swallow for you. Dar I suggest.. You are a newbie at dynamic webpages?

Your post is reasonable dificult to answer, because it is all about the system behind the actual code.

In your case, you could have:

Main table forums:
[id][label][restricted]

Main table threads:
[id][titel][content][posterid][parent][order]

And you could create the first page by just
"select * from forums";

The forum page you can then create:
"Select * from threads where parent = form_id";

For individual thread you can than:
"select * from threads where parent=$thisthread";

All you need to do is make sure that the first thread does not start at 1 (As that is a forum ID) but at say 20 (which would allow you to create 20 different forums)

rmbarnes82

Hi,

I think you need to define both the system and the problem a little better in order to get an answer to this one.

For example, try describing the database structure in terms of entities and thier relationships. Like this maybe:

Tables: forum, category, topic

Each forum has many categories
Each category has many topics

Then go onto describe the page views (in terms of user experience) that you are working on.

E.g.
Page: Main forum view - This page is a list of categories in a forum, click on a category and you are taken to the relevant 'topic view'.

Page: Topic View' - This page lists all topics within a given view.

Then state which page view / table your problem relates to, and the nature of the problem.

Also another tip:

topics (how many topics it holds) and posts (how many posts it holds)

The number of posts / topics should not be stored in the database, you don't want to have to update these each time a post / topic is added. These values can be generated dynamically in SQL using the count() function.

Robin

Muncey

Yeah i am new-ish to PHP, ive made a few dynamic flash sites using flash, php and some xml at times.

Im not new to programming, been doing it for a few years now but i agree, ive just gone and jumped in the deep end.

Thanks for the post, i think before i continue i will do some smaller projects, read a lot more on PHP and stuff then do a crucial thing i havn't done much of... plan.

Thanks for all the help! Hopefully you won't see me asking for more help concerning the basic forum project for a few months lol.