Phoenix Network Forums

hi,
Im building a website for a club I go to at my school and was wondering how forums like this one are made. does it use html or is it somthing special? and am i in the right forum to be asking this question?

fishpoo222 wrote:hi,
Im building a website for a club I go to at my school and was wondering how forums like this one are made. does it use html or is it somthing special? and am i in the right forum to be asking this question?

This forum runs phpBB ( http://www.phpbb.com), its made in php ( http://www.php.net ) and uses a database like MySQL or MSSQL or PostgreSQL or Oracle.

Offcourse an own coded board can be usefull.
If you want to make your own forum/bulletin board i advise you to learn php & MySQL. And good knowledge of python is always easy in some cases.

so does that mean I have to load new software onto the school computers
cos the administrator is realy boring, we cant load anything, we have macromedia dreamweaver would that be able to do it?
and what do you mean by coded board? (bit of a newbie question huh? )

For a forum like this one, as said, you need the phpBB package. This is not a program to install, it's a collection of PHP web-pages. You unpack them into your WWW-directory and then configure it online.

However, as also said, there needs to be a database server running which you have access to.

For creating ("coding") your own forum: as you can write HTML, you can write PHP, which (in this case) is a language embedded in HTML. But you are not going to create an own forum software until you know the basics. So drop Dreamweaver and learn writing plain HTML yourself.

are there any good websites youd recomend for learning php?

fishpoo222 wrote:are there any good websites youd recomend for learning php?

Its rather php that uses template system to display html in my case but oh well.

First of all you will need to get away from the idea that clientside scripting can do everything.

Then you go to http://www.php.net/ and you go to the manual and you read the quick intro into php. Then you use google to find php tutorials on what you want. Don't start of with a forum, even better coders have problems with making a secure forum.

bart416 wrote:First of all you will need to get away from the idea that clientside scripting can do everything.

Then you go to http://www.php.net/ and you go to the manual and you read the quick intro into php. Then you use google to find php tutorials on what you want. Don't start of with a forum, even better coders have problems with making a secure forum.

This is a very good advice. You also need to get away from the idea that WYSIWYG-editors are useful. They are not for serious web-designing. You need to learn HTML in order to play around with PHP.

To make this clear: As said, PHP is a programming language embedded into the markup language HTML. You place active (programming) PHP code, where the passive (markup) HTML code is dynamic. In other words: you place PHP where the content is not fully determined (kinda reminds me of quantum physics and superposition =D).

All the thread pages in this forum are in reality only one single PHP page with the dynamic part being the text of the thread (and some other things). At the time of writing the forum page, you can't tell, what content is going to be displayed in that page (the content is not determined). As user input (a request from a browser) arrives, this info is complete and the proper page can be displayed.

What that means: you need not only learn PHP to generate the HTML code, you also need to learn HTML itself, otherwise you can't generate it. So drop Dreamweaver (and other WYSIWYG-editors) and get some source level editor, one of which I can really recommend is Bluefish.

What you need, my good man (or woman...what do I know ) is www.w3schools.com there yu can learn anything you want...and they teach it so it'll stay W3C-compatible (if you don't know what the W3C is, check out www.w3.org )

Also, you'll need a better editor then dreamwaver (it's fine for HTML, but for PHP it's not one I'd use...). I use Notepad+, but I've used microsofts default Notepad until a month ago

I think I got your meening, you want to set up an easy to maintain forum. well, you should have a look here: http://opensourcecms.com/. specificly under the forums section, there are ratings for each system and you can test them online with the admin user and pass they give you to test them.

funman wrote:What you need, my good man (or woman...what do I know )

dont worry im male (im not sure if you call a 14 year old a man but hey thanks for the complement )

im just having a look at your sites now.

I know that any mature forum would use a "real SQL Database" (oracle, sql, mysql, postgres) hopefully one with hierarchical or/ relational tables, etc..

BUT the so called "real SQL databases" arent the only way of storing a database. A most fearful way is using flat text files. Flat text files databases were used in some of the old DOS windows games, and are still used today for a number of basic reason including easy dataexchange (CSV)

So what is a Flat text file?
Flat text files are still used for numerous reasons,, ie. your ini (windows) or your .conf,.cfg,config (*nix). CSV are actually databases in flat text files. (These also include markup languages such as XML and HTML in flats-text most basic definition, though they are more complex than that of common flat-files.)

let's say you couldn't run Mysql/Postgres/ or any other free server on the unix shell (and this was concrete.. no other options..cry), but you did have perl and apache. Well.. walla.. cgi perl flat text database..

http://www.databasejournal.com/sqletc/article.php/1428581

If you could install perl modules...
Sprite Flat text SQL

http://search.cpan.org/~shgun/Sprite-3.21/Sprite.pm

Now if you could use Python CGI..
SQL lite (not neccessary flat text but not a bloat)
http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/

Ruby implementation is Kirby
http://www.netpromi.com/kirbybase_ruby.html

(fire away.. at why this is a bad idea for forums)

so would you say a flat text file is a file containing straight text rather that compiled code?

As From The wikipedia Its self..

The classic example of a flat file database is a basic name-and-address list, where the database consists of a small, fixed number of fields: Name, Address, and Phone Number. Another example is a simple HTML table, consisting of rows and columns. These types of database are so common that we often see one without thinking of it as a database at all.

Yeah.. pretty much anything file not encoded, or compilied is flat text.

I understand now, thanks

You can use phpbb or vBulletin.

Just install them on your server...