Password protected message board

[thutt]

I want to set up a message board for staff on the school intranet, protected by their network usernames/passwords.
I guess there are two issues here! How do I put together a message board and how do I set up the password protection. Can this be done within dreamweaver or do I need additional prog's.
If you have some ideas, suggestions or can point me at some text books I would be grateful.

Cheers

Tony Hutt, Sir Frank Markham School

[Imar]

Hi Tony,

Are you looking for something ready-made, or do you want to code it yourself?

Depending on what mean with a message board, you can take a look at the source of this forum. It's open source, so you can use and adapt it if you want.

Otherwise, you may want to elaborate a bit about the requirements. Building a message board from scratch isn't a trivial task, so it may be useful if you have some expertise in ASP (or PHP, or another scripting language), database design and other general Web programming skills.

Cheers,

Imar


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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

[thutt]

Hello Imar

My aim is a message board consisting of departmental forums and one for all staff which people could log into. If department heads had editing rights, they could maintain these forums. If the simplest solution is to use ready-made resources, so be it. Whilst I am interested in learning the craft and avidly read up on new developments, it always takes a long time to get one's head around these things. I have done nothing with ASP or PHP and only a little VBA but have worked a lot with Access databases and have successfully built the school's website with Dreamweaver, so I would welcome pointers on which sources of code to look at. In short, what is the easiest way to achieve my goal?

I am grateful for all advice.

Many thanks

Tony

quote:Originally posted by Imar
 Hi Tony,

Are you looking for something ready-made, or do you want to code it yourself?

Depending on what mean with a message board, you can take a look at the source of this forum. It's open source, so you can use and adapt it if you want.

Otherwise, you may want to elaborate a bit about the requirements. Building a message board from scratch isn't a trivial task, so it may be useful if you have some expertise in ASP (or PHP, or another scripting language), database design and other general Web programming skills.

Cheers,

Imar


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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

[Imar]

If you think what you see around here is good enough, I'd go for that. The Snitz forums have proven themselves over time as a relatively fast and stable forum (there are currently over 12,000 members, with more than 34,000 posts).

However, if the Snitz forum has too much features, you may be better over cresting a solution yourself. Although you can take the source of this forum as the basis for your own project, and strip what you don't need.

If you want to take this on yourself, I recommend a book like "Beginning Dreamweaver MX 2004". I am a bit biased as I am one of the authors of that book, but I know the book covers the areas you need to know more about to take up a task like this very well. You'll need to know how forms work in ASP, how to connect to a datasource, how to insert and update records in that datasource, how to link detailed pages to lists (master-detail scenario's) etc etc.

It's difficult to say in a post like this: "do this and do that, and it will work". With a book, you'll get a solid understanding of the underlying technologies which is important for a project like this.
Other books you could take a look at are Beginning / Professional ASP 3.0 or Beginning ASP Databases.

In addition to books, you may want to take a look at these sites:

http://www.asp101.com/
(for their simple and outdated messageboard, look here: http://www.asp101.com/resources/aspforum_revisions.asp)
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/
http://forum.snitz.com/ (for the open source Snitz forum)

I'll be more than happy to answer specific questions related to building a message board. However, the question is currently a bit too broad to answer at once.

Investigate any of these resources, see if they make sense. If you need more help, please let me know.

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

[thutt]

Thanks Imar, I can now see where to focus my efforts.
I may be back!
Tony