Forum Design

[Xoviat]

I've spent a little more time on here recently with this new forum layout. I see it as an extremely professional piece of work and I wish to compliment whoever is responsible for putting it together on a well-thought out and implemented design. Take a bow! I'd also be interested which tools you used (if any).

 

I am presently writing my own forum from scratch. I don't like working with ready made solutions, I learn nothing that way. I spend quite a bit of time sitting here, figuring out how to mimic some of the functionality of THIS forum as I believe it's THAT good. Naturally, I'm not writing some sort of rip-off, but it reminds me of everything that I should incorporate and has some interesting approaches to the user interface. I have more limitations due to the server space available, but do I find it entertaining (the geek in me can't help it).

 

There are MANY forums out there, I would like for this topic to be used for suggestion and discussion of quality forum designs out there as well as available tools. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has gone about coding their own and this topic could be a platform for exchanging information and ideas on the subject.

 

Does anyone else have other examples of forums worth looking at?

[2bigpigs]

I learnt PHP and mysql by writing my own forums system 2 months ago. It's not very professional since i had only been writing php for a month and coding in general for a year.

 

This forum runs on IPB3, made InvisionPower board. IPB is a great forum software.

 

You can always go to http://www.big-boards.com/ to and do a filter by forums software.

 

PHPBB is an open-source forums software. You can find the code and database structures by googling ( Though it's more fun to design your own and then compare).

VBulletin isn't as sexy but it's quite popular.

And the custom thing 4chan runs on i guess. Careful with 4Chan, I've never dared to venture into it.

 

I hope you've messed with the admin-CP of a forum, It really helps your understanding of the code at work.

Can i keep updated on your work? I'm curious about how you'd be doing it and like to compare my work against someone elses.

[Xoviat]

Can i keep updated on your work? I'm curious about how you'd be doing it and like to compare my work against someone elses.

 

I'm all for it. So far, all I've done is create and display a forum structure with view/write perms and displayed posts which I've manually entered into the DB behind it. The code itself is a mess, but for now, I'm fine with that as all I'm doing is making something that works.

 

When I've got to the stage where I've converted it into objects (Instead of sitting here with reams of paper, I figure things out coding, it helps me model an OOP solution), I'd be happy to send you the .php files.

 

BBCode has been a bit of a stumbling block for me. The PEAR package is a script injection nightmare and uses deprecated HTML tags. I think there's something like 190 known bugs in there and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. For now, I'm just using regex expressions for basic formatting and span tags. Any input on this would be appreciated.

[2bigpigs]

Cool.

I'd say mysql queries were probably the hardest parts when i was writing mine. Mine sucks though. Make no mistake about it but what evolved from it isn't that bad and that is what brought me here.

I didn't get a hang of objects in PHP till last week.

I was a bit surprised that i had to use $this everywhere. Not like C++

 

I should probably get to rewriting a lot of my code now that i'm a bit more at ease with PHP.

 

Also, XSS is something i spent a lot of time reading on when i was doing my bbcode.

I used a simple str_replace system. Boy was it vulnerable

[Xoviat]

XSS, why didn't I think of that? Doh!

 

Problem solved.

[2bigpigs]

Wait, what?

How can XSS solve any problems?

 

I had the simple str_replace version of url tags and img tags.

I started off with

str_replace($str, '[url=', '<a href="');str_replace($str, ']' , '">' ) ;
str_replace($str, '[/url]', '</a>');

I could XSS by doing something like

[url=#" onmouseover="alert('xss');]Very interesting link [/url]

 

Needless to say, I changed it the same night.

[Xoviat]

Sorry, I was actually thinking about a XSLT/XML solution. Posting at 4am it's easy for the wires in the head to cross over.

[2bigpigs]

While we're on the topic of writing our own forums, Tell me what you think of my place: http://brickhouse.heliohost.org/

in terms of functionality. I think i've included all the basic things you'd expect but the code is pretty ugly.