Add A Forum To Your Site A guide to adding discussion forums to your site

[AdityaKar 0]

When youâre setting up a site using CSS, itâs a good idea to do a little planning ahead and think how youâll be using your styles, otherwise you could end up spending much more time later.

 

As a case in point â for a site Iâve recently built, a basic style sheet was put together, with entries for matters like headlines, section headings, item headings and so on. When it came to forms on the site that needed headings next to the data entry boxes, the logical choice was the item headings style. It helped maintain a consistent look across the site, but it came back to bite me later. The reason? After some feedback from the beta testers, a left margin was added, so that text didnât butt up against the left-side of a browser window. You might think that is fairly straightforward. And it would be, but for the fact that simply adding a margin to all the CSS styles would do the same wherever a style was used, making the headings on some of the forms look a little odd.

 

So, the solution was to duplicate the appropriate style â before adding the margin to it â and call the new duplicate something useful like âformItemHeadingâ. Then, amend the original item heading style to add the margin and, finally, go through the entire site changing headings in forms to the new style. Itâs tedious work and something that could have been avoided had I done the thing that Iâm always urging other people to do â plan, plan and plan. Even if you first imagine that two types of element on your page â in my case item headings, and form box headings â will look the same, remember that they are separate items and, though it might feel tedious at the time, create a separate CSS style for each type of item. It will save you a lot of time if you need Building a community Add a forum to your site and planning ahead with CSS to make changes to the style sheet later . Youâll just need to alter the style sheet â which is best saved as a separate file, rather than included in each document, for large sites â instead of having to manually edit every page and reassign styles later. Itâs far better to end up with a few extra styles in your style sheet than to have too few. The amount of data in a style sheet is trivial, so itâs really not going to make any difference to the download time of your site.

 

Attracting visitors One of the things that most web designers would like is for their site to be visited by lots of people. You can promote it â but not by using junk mail â and mention it elsewhere on the Internet, put it in your email signature and arrange reciprocal links with similar sites. But none of that is much use unless thereâs a compelling reason for people to keep coming back. So, how do you tackle that sort of thing? It was one of the issues facing the site on which I had my style sheet tribulations. Itâs a site thatâs intended to be a resource for users of a digital video recorder, which can be enhanced via software downloads.

 

But a site that simply lists things you can download isnât terribly exciting, so we needed something to try and draw people back. The obvious answer to that is forums.

 

Discussion forums can help provide a community and draw people back to your site to see the answers to questions theyâve posed. Obviously, theyâre not relevant to every site, but for the site in question, it seemed a logical idea. And one that immediately raises the question â how do I add a forum? There are several packages that you can use to provide forums. In some cases, the type of forum that you can install will depend on your web host. Two of the most popular and well known are phpBB and YaBB. The former is actually a component of the PHP Nuke (https://www.phpnuke.org/) open source portal system, though you can install it separately, if you donât want all the other portal functions.

 

As you can guess from the name, you need PHP on your web server to run phpBB. Youâll also need the MySQL database, which is used as the back-end of the system â donât worry if you donât have the two on the main part of your site. If you have a site like http://www.nigelwhitfield.com/v2/, it wonât look odd if you use a separate site like forum.nigelwhitfield.com to host your discussions, but obviously youâll also need to be able to manage the DNS entries to set that up. YaBB is written in Perl, which is also a very popular scripting language and available on many web servers. Rather than use a database, it stores its information in text files, so all you need is the ability to run Perl scripts on your web host, rather than PHP scripting, MySQL and full access to a database. On the downside, the file structure might store up problems for the future if youâre running a very busy site.

 

In the end, though, we went with YaBB (http://www.yabbforum.com/), which is very easy to set up. Itâs a simple matter of downloading a zip file, unpacking it and then uploading the files to your web server. You need to edit the Settings.pl file to tell the scripts where your files are stored, both in terms of the URL and of the directory on the server, and then make sure the script is set so that it can be executed. Then log in to the web page with the default admin user name and password, and fill in a few simple web forms to set up your forums. It really is extremely easy to do. If you want to tweak the design a little, for instance, to match the colour scheme of your website, itâs easy â just click on the Admin link, and you can alter the template file, with its CSS definitions from within your browser. That really is just about all it took â certainly less than half an hour. Even if youâre not familiar with Perl, itâs not exactly difficult to edit the settings file and get up and running. If you want a forum on your site, itâs well worth taking a look at. A forum isnât necessarily the only thing that youâll need.

 

On the site I was setting up, we decided that it would be a good idea to have a function that allowed users to build up a personal page with information and quick links to the things they want to download. Itâs a handy tool that might help bring people back â especially since you can then email people when a new version of a product in their list appears, providing you seek their consent. And to help tie it in with the forums, and give an incentive to register, the functions restricted only to those who have signed up for the forums. That might sound complicated, but itâs a lot simpler to do than you might imagine. All you do is check for the cookie thatâs set when a user logs in to the forums, and only allow the personalisation scripts to run when thatâs set. In the case of YaBB, the default cookie is called YaBBusername, though you can change it if you like. You can check for the presence of the cookie with some PHP code like this, which, if before the HTML section of a document, will redirect to the forum home page if the cookie is not there.

 

<?php if ( ! isset($HTTP_COOKIEd _VARS[âYaBBusernameâ]) )

 

{ header(âLocation: d http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ bin/yabb/YaBB.cgiâ) ; exit ; }

 

(Key: d code string continues)

 

 

 

You may want to redirect to a different page, explaining why people need to sign into the forums. Linking functions of the site like this can help to encourage people to sign up, since thereâs a tangible benefit to doing so. But donât do it just for the sake of it â think of how people might want to use your site and work around that. Pointlessly restricting functions or sections of your site is likely to turn people away, rather than encourage them. Reader queries David Boswell asks: âis it possible to reduce the size of an Excel spreadsheet saved as a web page, other than by printing out, scanning and reducing it as an object? Printing out in Excel does not reproduce the macro buttons and I also need the very best definition I can get. Using the zoom factor on the spreadsheet before saving it as a web page does not seem to work.â The answer is, sort of. When you save a web page as Excel, either on a Mac or PC, whatâs created â unless you use embedded objects inWindows â is simply an HTML table, with formulas changed to the results they use. (Actually, strictly speaking, the formulas are still there, in XML, so the spreadsheet could be recreated from the HTML file). At the top of the file, youâll find an embedded stylesheet. You can edit that â you could set up a global search and replace if you do this often â to alter the options, including font sizes, so that you end up with the desired effect. If you have the last twoWeb Development columns, you can now marvel at the forethought of including a crash course on CSS in them. Alternatively, depending on the browser youâre using, you have a few different options. In Internet Explorer, the View/Text Size menu options wonât work because there are sizes specified in the document. But if you choose Accessibility from the Internet Options, you can override text sizes and styles in the document, which will then allow the menu options to increase or decrease text size to work. You could even create your own style sheet to apply, though that would only be worth the effort if you used an almost identical spreadsheet template a lot. If youâre using Opera, you can zoom in and out of a page, regardless of the style sheet thatâs been applied, so you can easily fit more of a spreadsheet into theWindows. And you can also click the drop-down view mode menu at the right to switch to User mode, which will use your own default styles, instead of the ones specified in the file.

Author: Pranay

Edited March 21, 2006 by Aditya (see edit history)

[SOAD524 0]

Author: Pranay

MAN THATS A LONG POST I TRYED TO READ IT BUT MY BRAIN STARTED TO HURT

[twitch 0]

Next time you make a post like this, at least add your own content instead of just "Author: Pranay".

[Houdini 0]

Here's my Add a Forum to your site tut.

Download phpBB2

Create a new database

Upload the unzipped forum to your server

Run the install

Enter your new forum as admin and set it up

Add a few new posts to your new forums

Author: Me

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

I really hate administering phpBB, it's so tedious and there aren't really many features to play with unless you install mods. For me, I love Quicksilver Forums, you can get a board up and running in literally 5 minutes.

 

1. Download Quicksilver Forums

2. Unpack the archive

3. Upload to the server

4. Run the installer

5. Delete the install directory

 

Author: ME

 

Voila! Your board is ready, then add categories and forums.

 

xboxrulz

Edited July 4, 2006 by xboxrulz (see edit history)

[writemaggie1 0]

MAN THATS A LONG POST I TRYED TO READ IT BUT MY BRAIN STARTED TO HURT

People make things so complicated. I have a web site that I have just begun. I don't try to do everything at once though I have plenty of ideas. Try just exploring one of these at a time rather than doing everythingat once. Or you could have sepearate sites for differnt aspects of your life. Most of us are complex creatures.

Next time you make a post like this, at least add your own content instead of just "Author: Pranay".

If the cap fits wear it.

[finaldesign1405241487 0]

If you would reccomend some forum software to someone, which one would it be?Im just wondering, there are soo much out there, free ones, paid ones... I would preferably install one on my web at final-design.net, currently im running some small forums there, but a solution with more options would be needed soon... so any suggestions?

[Houdini 0]

Actually it is just a matter of personal preferences (at least as far as free forum software). If you have the financial means to do so or are able to text out some paid sofware then the best solution would be to first try out all the forum software that is available. The first one I tried actually was Invision and then Mersury ( which might be Quicksilver) of course this was 1998 1999 and they were fairly new and not as developed as they are now.Then later I retried Mercury, and Invision was still free (until I think September 2004) I also tried PunBB Yabb (now SMF) SMF phpBB2 and someother little known BBS. They all have their own merits, either speed or ease of install, or features built in, ease of set up, options available, skins available, ease of modification and really the only way to determine this is to try them all until you find one you are comfortable with. phpBB has just come out with the phpBB3-Beta which I have and installed but for some reason I need to keep relogging in as admin and my changes do not take effect (it could be a bug, or I might neeed to reinstall it I just don't know) but it is a major change with more feature for the administrator but so far not working out too well).So just try different ones out and determine for your self the one you like the most would be the best way to make such a personal decision.

[korireed 0]

Wow, you must have had a lot of time on your hands on that one.I agree with you on 95% of the points you made, however, as much as I agree with the CSS part, what did it have to do with your title "Add A Forum To Your Site?"It kind of was like, pointless in that aspect.

[MediYama 0]

Installing a forum isn't that hard, I have already done it.. five times or so. Over and over, because I missed a setting or because I didn't like the forum .

[ethergeek 0]

I really hate administering phpBB, it's so tedious and there aren't really many features to play with unless you install mods.

AMEN to that! I used phpbb for so long before I got fed up with the lack of functionality provided out-of-the-box with SMF and jumped ship.

[fys777 0]

after i uploaded to file server, where do i run the installer??currently i'm using awardspace.com free host plan.any help appreciate -D thx

[khalilovitch 0]

Where do i get ready to use scripts for forums?

[WeaponX 0]

Depending on what forum you are using, it can be a bunch of sites. If you just search online for your forum you are using and the work hack or mod after it, I'm sure you will find the mods/hacks for it.

[fys777 0]

how to edit the Settings.pl ?tutorial plz? which settings file should edit it ?:\\quicksilverforums-1.3.1:\\quicksilverforums-1.3.1\admincp\sources