Can this be done?

[izwar]

Lets say i have a website, i want it to have forums. Its a community website were ppl have their picture profiles. Can i get a program like PHP BB or v Bulletin and make it so they dont have to register seperately for the forum, so the actual membership of my site carries over into the forum. Also can i make it so their avatars are default their users pictures.

Or do i need a custom forum built by my programmers. Beacuse right now their bulding me a custom forum and im getting a head ache because they dont understand anything its so frustrating.

[Giles]

You can. They just have to share a member database.

A while ago I ran a postnuke website and installed the forums module. This kept the same users and avatars as the website.

[Emancipator]

With vbulletin the key component to keep in mind when doing this is the SALT variable or you will pull your hair out trying to figure out why the code wont work.

[izwar]

which forum do you reccomend i use to pull this off. Vbulletin, PHP BB or what?

[Emancipator]

your going to need to learn a bit of php before you can truly pull it off. Phpbb is much easier then vbulletin to do it with, depending on what your trying to do.

[izwar]

well im gonna buy a php book today, and dedicate all summer to php i hope that mite be enough. If not im gonna get someone to do it perhaps a freelancer or something.
What i want to do is just make the forums part of the site, carry over the membership to the forums so they dont a hve to sign up for the forums separatley, and have user avatars as their user pictures.

How much PHP would i need to know, you think i can do it after a month of the book. Perhaps with some guidance loll. If not how much you think a freelancer should charge for this job 50 bux? if any one is interested let me know haha.

[Emancipator]

hmmm i dont know what a freelancer would charge but I know i wouldnt do it for $50 but im expensive :P. there are tutorials on vbulletin.org on how to do it i am pretty sure :)

[izwar]

how long you think it would take me to learn how to do this if i start learning the basics of PHP, ive started learning about variables, strings, if and else, and some other small stuff but i dont understand how all that stuff builds big applications lol.

[jacob]

those are the building blocks for building an application.....

Lego seems to be the only real-world way I can think of to explain this in "english" at the moment. Imagine you've gone to your local toy shop and bought a 5,000 piece lego rocket ship. When you take it home and open it up, you have the instructions on how to build it (or the design specs), you have all the pieces in place to put it together, and several hours you'll have to dedicate to building this rocket ship. You open up the box and holy crap, 5,000 pieces is a LOT of lego but thankfully we have instructions that show us how to put it together thru over a 100+ step process.

You pick up the instructions and step one indicates you need 3 black 6 thingie legos. You break open the first bag of lego pieces, and start looking for three, black, 6 thingie lego pieces. As you go thru the bag, you look at each piece and in your mind are going, "If this is a 6 prongie black lego, keep, else, put back into bag". You will "loop" thru your "Ifs" until you've found the 3 pieces you need, then you will place two down and one on top to build the first piece as shown in the instructions. Then you look at step 2 in the instructions and will again go thru those series of loops and ifs until you've eventually implemented your rocket ship!

Now thankfully those people at Lego have done the requirements analysis and design for the rocket ship for you and built the smaller pieces of the project and all you need to do is put the pieces together. In some real world scenarios, this is how it's done where a programmer is just handed the design specs and they implement the solution. Or on bigger projects, certain members or certain teams will build pieces of the project which eventually all ties together.

The morale I'm trying to create in my Lego example is that you have to look at and design all the small pieces for the project and attempt to do it in a methodical approach rather then swallow the entire project upfront. Most of those who are new to programming are very overwhelmed and don't know where/how to design a "big application". The best advice you'll get is to break it into smaller chunks and if you need to, those chunks into smaller chunks, etc. Learning a programming language is just one of a number of things you'll need to learn if you want to create a functional and well designed and useable application.

One thing I've found helpful is looking at larger applications to see how they work and making modifications as need be. how long will it take you to learn? That really depends on you and how well and how quickly you grasp the concepts both of the language you're using and of programming concepts. You're on the right track right now and it'll only be a matter of time before you are able to tackle bigger solutions then outputting "hello world!"

[John]

Great metaphor :)

[izwar]

thanks i get it now, im just a lil discouraged from beggining as ive started a little and it already seems hard.

[izwar]

im gonna have someone do this for me, but after reading some stuff on php security i want to do it with V Bulletin , is it a lot harder to do this with V Bulletin.

Also my friend has all the vbulletin files that he used on his site, can i just use his vbulletin files? would vbulletin know that i didnt pay for it or what?

[Emancipator]

Izwar the fact your even contemplating stealing it worries me.

[izwar]

lol, relax im not gonna use it anymore, im actually ending up going with PHP BB for now untill i get the money to buy V Bulletin, ill just slap on those extra security mods in the mean time.