Setting up a forum

[ktbubster]

I have a website that I am putting up. Basically a bit of a Political/Opinion/Current events sorta thing. I have a good design and some content, but need two things.

First of all, I need some suggestions for a good place to get a domain name, and a good place to host it (the cheaper the better, but obviously I don't want a crappy company either) I am hoping for a decent amount of traffic and...I want to host a forum on there too which leads me to my next questions...

Does anyone have a step by step way of setting up a forum? I'm most likely doing the site in Dreamweaver (as I pretty much already have a template on there I started to work on a while back that seems to be working well) but I heard that there isn't really a way of setting up a forum with that, but it's a different software process?

Could someone give me a step by step way to go about getting a forum set up? Can I paste script into dreamweaver and build around it to get a nice cohesive feel to it? How do I do this? ANY input would be great as this is my first time setting up anything like this. It seems like it should be a fairly simple thing to add to a site, but maybe not.

Thanks in advance!

 

[janitorC7]

I have a website that I am putting up. Basically a bit of a Political/Opinion/Current events sorta thing. I have a good design and some content, but need two things.

First of all, I need some suggestions for a good place to get a domain name, and a good place to host it (the cheaper the better, but obviously I don't want a crappy company either) I am hoping for a decent amount of traffic and...I want to host a forum on there too which leads me to my next questions...

Does anyone have a step by step way of setting up a forum? I'm most likely doing the site in Dreamweaver (as I pretty much already have a template on there I started to work on a while back that seems to be working well) but I heard that there isn't really a way of setting up a forum with that, but it's a different software process?

Could someone give me a step by step way to go about getting a forum set up? Can I paste script into dreamweaver and build around it to get a nice cohesive feel to it? How do I do this? ANY input would be great as this is my first time setting up anything like this. It seems like it should be a fairly simple thing to add to a site, but maybe not.

Thanks in advance!

Essentially, No.

You can us free forums that are hosted elsewhere, and then just link to them.

Otherwise you are looking at something that you will have to do outside of Dreamweaver.

phpbb is a good one.

I recommend that you learn some things and get a CMS, I recommend drupal.

 

[ktbubster]

I am trying to learn some things!

What is a CMS?

I know I can't do this within dreamweaver, but how do I look at the way a forum is set up and make it cohesive with a main site? pphpp - I'll look into that.

What is this "free forums hosted elsewhere" stuff? Can I find a site that hosts forums and make my own forum (mods and such) to just link to my site? Is that what you mean?

 

[Cromulent]

A CMS is something like PHP Nuke or Drupal.

For buying a domain name I would look at GoDaddy.com and buy your webhosting from a different company. It is always a good idea to keep the domain and webspace separate as some hosting companies have been know to hold domain names to ransom if you buy both from the same company.

Basically forums often have their own web interface which is how you setup templates (I'm talking about vBulletin as it is the only forum software that I have much experience with). Very little is done in an external editor unless you want to edit the PHP files directly, in which case you can use a standard text editor of choice (Pico or Nano through SSH work well).

 

[macgruder]

You could try something like http://bloxio.us/

This is free, and you get a Wordpress driven site (i.e. CMS/blogging software) with some extra features like page layout, style-sheets etc, and the ability to embed flash, youtube, podcasts etc. plus a PHPBB bulletin board and a Wiki. You just sign up as yourself and then create a community which others can join. It's in Beta but its works pretty well. Of course, rather than your own domain name you would get something like foobar.bloxio.us but it is free and it might be a good place to start.

 

[matperk]

I've used phpBB before and version 3 is really nice. It's free and v3 is starting to have a lot of the same features as the somewhat expensive IPB forum software.

It's powerful and dynamic and i recommend that.