a good tutorial on creating a php forum from scratch

Question

hi, i've been looking online and cant find a good tutorial on creating a forum from scratch. i just want to wrap my head around what it takes to create something more advance than what i am capable of. if you know of a good tutorial let me know.

thanks

Answer 1

I wouldn't. I would just rip apart PHPbb, or use that for what you want to do. As Jeff Atwood said; Don't reinvent the wheel unless you want to know more about it.

Answer 2

PHP does very little to encourage good designs. I would suggest finding a popular PHP framework, look at some example code for that framework and try building the forum in a structured way. You could learn quite a bit from this exercise. The frameworks are not necessary, only helpful for taming the madness that is PHP.

Answer 3

I'm not sure what your difficulty is here to be honest. You know how forums work right? They're not inherently complicated. The use cases are:

• Register;
• Login;
• Admin: create/remove forums;
• View list of forums;
• View messages in a forum (including pagination);
• View thread (including pagination);
• Create a new thread;
• Reply to a thread;
• Edit a post;
• View user's profile;
• Edit profile.

And that's a forum in a nutshell. Surely you can fumble your way through that right?

Optional but more sophisticated use cases include:

• Security: hiding a forum, making a forum read only;
• Maintain users (changing passwords, banning users, granting/revoking admin/moderator rights);
• Moderated: new threads must be approved by a moderator;
• Sticky threads (and unsticky);
• Signatures;
• HTML or bbcode or similar support for markup (rather than just plaintext);
• RSS feeds to forums and threads;
• Email notifications (subscribe/unsubscribe)) to nominated forums and threads;
• Lock threads (no further replies);
• etc.

You can do as much or as little of that as you like.

You can also identify the entities and attributes:

• User (username, encrypted password, name, nickname, email address, bio, signature);
• Roles (name, privileges);
• User Roles (user, role);
• Forum (name, visible roles, write permission roles);
• Thread (name, forum);
• Message (thread, post date, author, title, content);
• Message History (message, date, edited by, changed text);
• etc

And the database schema pretty much writes itself.

Anyway I'm just not sure what you're looking for out of a tutorial. For me a tutorial is to teach me something I don't know (like a new language). You know PHP (I assume?). You know how forums work (from a user point of view). There's not really much more to it.

Answer 4

If you are wanting to learn basics here are some

http://www.phpeasystep.com/workshopview.php?id=12

video tutorials

But if you want to build a comprehensive forum, you need to finalize on what all features do you want to implement, then make a database structure then start coding. You can use those tutorials as building blocks and develop over them stage by stage.

Forums in general are not that complicated they are just they are just posting data to the database and then retrieving it.

Answer 5

It's probably rather out of date, now, but try Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. His approach to website automation is actually quite minimalistic, and he doesn't use PHP, but he devotes a chapter to writing some forum pages that are only about as complex as he needs it to be (no threading, for instance).

As with any project, you don't want to get carried away. Forum software is easy to keep adding features on to and before long you have a bit of a monster. So think in small terms first. You need only a few basic objects: messages and users. You can do a simple reply chain, or you can group messages into topics. Then you can add forums for grouping topics.

Stay away from heirarchical threading to start with. Most people use a parent-ID design which unfortunately leads to lots of recursive SQL calls (which is inefficient). The other major alternative is set-trees which don't do that, but they are more complex to understand.

Answer 6

The question from the TS is a relevant one.

I'm an experienced PHP developer but I have yet to find a forum platform/framework which is designed for injection to an already existing site. Lots of forum softwares out there can be integrated into an arbitrary site but none (so far) has been crafted for adding to my own authentication, my own css schemas, my own MVC approach etc...

If anyone knows of any, somebody's gonna be happy!