Developing a forum as final year project

kojoamoah

I want to develop a forum as a final year project for my school. The school site lack a forum where students can discuss important issues. With this in mind, I want to create this forum using PHP but I have little knowledge in PHP and considering the time frame for us to complete the project, I will need a less complicated forum site for the school.
I just want someone to brief me on the most relevant pages that will be needed to have this project done within a time period of 4 months. Looking at the time period and someone with less PHP knowledge, I can't create very sophisticated forum site like this one so i only need the most relevant templates or pages for the site. Thank you.

kojoamoah

dagon

why not use one of the many pre-written ones

NogDog

If you have "little knowledge of PHP" trying to build a web forum is going to be a bit like jumping into the deep end before learning how to swim. You may be able to do something that works, but it will very likely be less than optimal and, more importantly, have numerous security holes. Even a professional developer is more likely to take an existing web forum package (such as this site uses VBulletin), and then maybe do some tweaking of it to customize it for a project's specific needs. There are already so many good to excellent PHP forum packages out there that it would seem redundant at best to try to build your own from scratch.

NogDog

Threads merged; please to not cross-post.