suggestion regarding my "question of the week" project

Question

Hi, everyone!

I am going to start on a new project for my school. I have to create a "question of the week" forum, where the members can post questions and their questions could then be voted by other members. The best question of that week will be discussed the week after, and the posting of the questions will take place again.

I am going to use MySQL as database, with backend in php.

Does anyone have some examples of something that I could use? Also, how will I be able to see a week in my project? I mean, how am I going to decide that a week has passed? I can not figure that out.

Do let me know about your suggestions.

Thank you!

Best
Zeeshan

Answer 1

• Pick a handful of the free php / mysql forum software programs. These should be a good starting point; phpBB, Vanilla, SMF, BBpress.
• Install and configure each of them, and figure out which one makes most sense to you in terms of ease of use, ease of customisation, etc.
• You may find that these forums have enough features to achieve what you are after without any extra effort, but if not, then start customising!

Answer 2

To see a weeks worth of data, you would create a database query that would view only the current weeks questions posts. The algorith would look like:

1. Get current day
2. From the current day, find the last day of the week (you have to decide what you consider the last day of the week)
3. Subtract 7 days from the last day of the week
4. Write you query SELECT * FROM questions WHERE postdate >= @7DaysFromLastDayOfWeek

Hope that helps and makes sense.

Answer 3

If you don't want to go the trouble of hosting your own solution (even if it is the implementation of a existing application), google have an application called Moderator which you can either use standalone or embed into another web page - not sure if this is suitable?