OT: Need opinion on building a forum

[Anonymous Monk]

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

[grep]

Just some quick thoughts:

As for the free perl-based board YaBB seems to be feature filled and about what you are looking for. But you may spend as much time integrating things like users and sessions as you would using a framework.

As to the from scratch option, I wouldn't do it all the way from scratch. Catalyst should be a good starting point as a framework and if your existing code isn't bad it should be fairly easy to integrate the two (especially if you were good and used a templating system like Template Toolkit (or others) to build your original site).

If that doesn't seem like a good fit, then start with CGI::Application and Template Toolkit. This will give you more flexibility than Catalyst but it'll take longer.

A previous discussion: perl bulletin board

[fmerges]

Hi,

I would suggest to help on the development of Parley, a Catalyst based Forum app., instead of writing one from scratch...

Regards,

[stonecolddevin]

YaBB is no longer being maintained, they switched over to PHP and became Simple Machines. I would recommend Ikonboard, it's written in perl and looks pretty good to me.

Also, I'm working on some forum software (needs some updating, ignore 500 errors and such) myself.../msg me if you'd like to get involved.

P.S: it's going to take more than 3-4 days work to get a fairly functional board up...be warned.

[grep]

YaBB is no longer being maintained, they switched over to PHP and became Simple Machines.

According to the YaBB website they just released a new version 5 days ago (11/8/06).

[strat]

The Ikonboard is rather good, too. And you have the choice of storing the data in MySql or DB_File.