PHP and MySQL® Web Development, Fourth Edition

31 Building Web Forums

ONE GOOD WAY TO GET USERS TO RETURN TO your site is to offer web forums. They can be used for purposes as varied as philosophical discussion groups and product technical support. In this chapter, you implement a web forum in PHP. An alternative is to use an existing package, such as Phorum, to set up your forums.

Web forums are sometimes also called discussion boards or threaded discussion groups. The idea of a forum is that people can post articles or questions to it, and others can read and reply to their questions. Each topic of discussion in a forum is called a thread.

For this project, you implement a web forum called blah-blah. Users will be able to

  Start new threads of discussion by posting articles

  Post articles ...