Hello guys! This is my first post and I am excited to be on the most famous forum site on internet…
Our Database Management Systems course instructor asked us what would we be creating for our semester project, and I replied here that I am interested in creating a forum that runs in our college intranet servers. The problem is I am a complete n00b in MySQL and PHP and have no idea about anything other than knowing that these two are used to create forums.
After a quick search in our forum to check if similar posts have been made before, I found out things like PHPBB and noticed people talking about some commercial systems like vB etc., but I can’t use commercial things since it’s a project and we have to design our forum. I am not sure whether I can use PHPBB - because I have to show her that I did some work related to databases, administration, and transaction sorts of things through my project - and I don’t think there would be much database design etc. if I use something “ready made” like that.
I am also thinking of using JQuery in the forum for things like username checking while registration and search engine webcrawlers.
I want you experts out there to help me in this regard…
Is creating a forum on my own a bad idea?
I know HTML, CSS and JavaScript to some extent, so will I be able to create a nice forum(given a time of one month) with two teammates who are pretty much as dumb as I am?
Is the combination of PHP, MySQL, JQuery enough to create a perfect database working behind the forum or do we need to learn something else?
I don’t think I can use content management systems like joomla or wordpress in my project as that would make the project look too shallow and it might get rejected.
I must say that as I started to think about the complexities involved in a forum, it struck me that the thing is actually LOT more harder than it looks…
Now this makes me feel very bad about my decision… I don’t want to screw up my first project itself…
Anyway, what good is a project if it weren’t challenging enough…
BTW sir, I would like to ask you about selection of features in our basic forum… What features we can drop in our initial design to make project a little simpler?
I am thinking of dropping moderators on the forum and leaving everything to admins, would that be a good idea? (As we will be hosting it on our intranet servers I think we can leave some security holes unattended before the project submission (if it comes out to be that way) and about a thousand people might use our forum, at most…)
I might be asking many stupid and unnecessary questions out of enthusiasm, but I will be very happy if some one points me towards a nice web article or some tutorials on creating a forum from scratch, if they know something like that… Thanks!!
There are open-source forums you could download and look at their table design. Forums get complicated, for example Simple Machines Forum (an open-source php/mysql forum) has some 63 tables.
Also,
Check out the simplest forum - http://www.seo-board.com/ that they designed to cover many features a forum software should have.
Database is light weight. So, it can give clues in every files they have written.
Probably the simplest form of a forum software that uses database.