Hi,

I have this online community that desperately needs a forum. I built the online community from scratch and its either A.) I find a perl cgi forum script out there and customize it OR B.) just build one from scratch.

The thought of Option B didn't even come to my mind when I realized there aren't that good forum systems written in perl out there thats freeware. I'm looking for a forum script using DBI and MySQL, but it seems like most ones cost around 200-400 bucks.

I don't need an advanced forum, something that can keep track of conversations and have 10-12 emotion icons. Since I built my community from scratch and it already has the member sign up, session management, and phpMyadmin to control the sites db, I feel like adding a forum wouldn't be too hard.

Or am I wrong? Is there more to a simple forum then I thought. I'm visioning the steps I would need to create my forum, and it really seems like 3-4 days work. I realized this may take the same exact amount of time as downloading a free script out there and hacking it up to my liking.

Any opinions or advice will be appreciated.

Thanks

In reply to OT: Need opinion on building a forum by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.