Website stuff!

Yeah.

Anyways, I have this website, never mind the coding... what you see there is what I've done in notepad and is due to be scrapped soon in favor of a site \"coded\" entirely with FrontPage.

It'll look esactly the same, albeit with maybe one or two more buttons to boot.

Currently, my site is rather \"blah.\" I'd like to add a news script to it, so I wouldn't have to keep going in and editing my \"index.html\" file to display the text I need it to for an update.

I'd also like to add a forum, though I'm on the understanding this is a relatively simple task.

Finally, I'd like to add a poll on the front of my page.

Anyone know how to do these things?

http://www.hotscripts.com/

Integrated forums are hard to find unless you program them by yourself. You can get separate forums (not integrated with the site) like phpBB, InvisionFree, Invision Power Board, Yahoo! forums, and vBulletin.

For paid, I would recommend either IPB or vBulletin.

For free, I would recommend InvisionFree (what we're using right now) 100%. Actually, I'd probably recommend InvisionFree over Invision Power Board.

Last edited by Greg M. on Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:40 pm; edited 1 time in total

Do you have PHP available on your host?

If so, you can create a PHP index page (html with a .php extension and a few php lines wherever you want them). If you look up some tutorials they will tell you exactly how to set this up. Anyway, then all you have to do is create a \"news\" php file and put whatever text and such you want in that part of the web page.

Much less hassle than editing your index.html

If you want general news, there are many places that provide those for you. www.digg.com has one that is pretty nice and VERY easy to add.

http://digg.com/jshomepageedit

If you're a beginner I'd recommend making the site out of Iframes.

Well, currently I've found a news \"client\" I'm rather beginning to hate, but the forum issue is all but \"resolved.\" I've got a phpBB forum installed, but I need to either customize my own skin for it or I need to find one that appears to blend with my site.

To add to that, what I'm looking to do is I'm trying to get it so that a person only needs to register once in order to reply both to the news and forum posts.

One idea was that I'd have a phpBB forum set aside for \"News,\" where only moderators could post, but users could reply. A few \"technological hurdles\" to overcome however -- I need my homepage (http://www.neweracinema.5gigs.com/ ) to display the news \"stories.\" A system similar to this idea can be seen at FXhome, a filmmaking enthusiasts site with some low-priced, high quality software products.[/ad]

The other idea was to have a news client independent of the forum, but have forum usernames and passwords be the same for both news commenting and forum posting. I'd think that, being that I use a phpBB forum board, I'd need to give the news thingy access to the MySQL database, specifically, the file/table that phpBB uses to store user accounts and such. Whatever the case, The Tech Report has a system like this.

Anyone know how to accomplish either?
-Pikl

I can help you out with the news thing if you like, its simple once you've got some PHP experience under your belt. (PM me your MSN/Jabber/AIM/IRC details). About the forum thing, you'll need to harvest some code from the forum software to understand its way of writing to the MySQL tables. You will need to write a PHP script to take this information on demand and make it readable to your website. Shouldn't be too hard, and theres bound to be some tutorials available through Google to make it even easier for you.