Implementing a cool forum for my site....

[Tekk]

I'd like to know what my options are as far as having a really cool (but not extremely sophisticated) forum for my senior project website. The project consists of setting up a dynamic website for an elementary school here in so. cal. The parents are supposed to be able to come to the site and login and be able to download forms, search the school directory, etc. One of the major portions of the project is to include a forum where parents can come and post info about upcoming events that they be hosting, talk about upcoming school events with other parents, and things of the sort.

I really enjoyed the layout of this forum and I was wondering about how I could implement something similar to this on my site. Considering we only have 8 weeks to complete this project we cant really hard-code something of this caliber so maybe a site that offers this service for a small fee or something would be great.

Anyone have any ideas or outlets for more info? Moderators would most likely know quite a bit about it

Thanks for the info!

YaWPS is the most simple forum and content management package available. All you need is a web server with Perl/CGI support. Check out the working demo at the project's site....

http://yawps.sourceforge.net/

The project is open source, thus the software is free for your purposes.

If you are wanting to go with a preconfigured setup, I recommend looking into any the popular small business collaboration services.

Robert Richmond

[jman01pa]

In the past, I have used YABB forums with great success. They are free and can be found here

http://www.yabbforum.com/

[crouse]

Techimo runs on vbulletin (not free) , but good.
I use phpBB2 which IS free..... and good
some useful phpbb links

http://www.phpbb.com/
http://www.phpbb.com/styles/demo.php
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpbb/

Build a phpBB Forum in 5 Steps
By Peter Lavin
March 7th 2004
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/build-a-phpbb-forum


some phpbb forums I've set up

www.usalug.org (of course )
www.midiowacamaroclub.com
http://www.iowawebmasters.com/demos/phpBB2/index.php

http://crouse.ws/ is a phpnuke site.... which is another easy route to go...... similar to http://clanimo.com which is i believe postnuke.

[Tekk]

cool

Now here's another question...my current setup is cable modem connected to Linksys BEFSR41 router which then goes out to 3 computers....2 running win2k (personal computers for whatever) and then the third is my WinServer2003. Now I finally got the IIS up and running correctly but what are the necessary steps for me to be able to view it outside of my network. For instance, if I wanted to show people my asp pages (residing on my server) from a computer at school, how do I correctly set it up so I can just type in an IP or something? Are there special settings for my router that i need? I most likely need to set a static IP for the web server but what about the actual ISP assigned IP which is what the router has......Im new to all this server stuff so bear with me

I use Snitz Forums 2000 on my site. It's real easy to setup and has lots of "hacks" so you can fine tune it the way you want.

It's running on a 2K Adv. Server, so it should sit on 2K3 just fine.

As for people being able to see the site from the IP, you need to forward Port 80 to your server.

Check out ZoneEdit.com so you can use a FREE DNS service and use a Domain Name instead of the IP. You'll have to acquire a Domain Name though.

[Tekk]

I'd like to point out another one that I found and one that Im gonna end up using. Its not quite as feature rich as other ones (which is ok for the simplistic internet users that will be using it) but its a fantastic looking one and I'd just like to get the word out for the creators since obviously they put alot o time into it.

http://www.asp-dev.com