quizzical.net

I thought I’d give all my avid readers a little update before I went to bed. Here goes…

Having set the forums up a few days ago, I decided to screw around with the database to put a news summary on the main page.

What a waste of time. Mad

I was considering writing the thing from scratch, as I had planned before.

Luckily, before the last shred of my sanity was lost to murderous rage, I checked with the PHPBB site and found a mod that did pretty much what I was looking for.

And it was good.

I still have to separate news from chats, though. And I know it looks a bit rough right now, but a cascading style sheet or two will make it look downright spiffy.

I hate to cut this short, but I should really get to bed, lest my brain leak out through my eye sockets.

John

The basic strategy for Quizzical.net has changed a number of times over the last few months, so let me recap. The initial idea was to have a website with a forum integrated throughout.

My initial inspiration was classicgames.org, which has a forum on nearly every page. So, armed with my roommate’s PERL book, I set out to write myself a website. I had just finished the CGI that would turn posts into files, when school started kicking my ass hardcore.

A few weeks ago, I decided I was going to do the same sort of thing, but in PHP/MySQL, which would be a good deal easier than PERL, especially where maintenance is concerned.

Just today, however, I decided that I would base my site on PHPBB2, a popular, open-source forum implementation. There have been thousands of man-hours spent on this project, so it would be wasteful for me to re-invent the wheel. My plan is to write my own basic SQL accessors, to present the most recent discussion on the main page, and to make my own nifty themes. Since PHPBB2 is open-source, I can change it where I need to.

Happy posting,
John