UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat Help needed!! - Building a community for artists

PlastiqueWeb NetWorks - a community for artists

We've had our server up for years now but haven't gotten far from where we started. We've been going through one design after another, but perhaps this time we'll actually get it right.

We had UBB5 up for about six months, after which we decided to burry the entire board since more than half of the threads were completely deteriorated from the modifications we had been doing at the time. After having killed the forums, we looked at the rest of the site. A few seconds later, that was gone too Best way to clean up the mess was to throw everything away and start from the beginning.

This time we want to keep it real and simple. No complicated features, unnecessary hacks, or unstable code. Our site used to be for IE only, now it's supports both IE and Netscape (although we don't guarantee 100% functionality on NS, far from it actually...)

We worked hard to create an overall layout for the entire site so that the main pages could blend well with the forums. Yet there remains a lot of work to do.

Here are some screenshots :


Main site - Build 3.2001.3.0


Forums (running on UBB 6.03)

To get to the point...

We want to start an online community where artists can share their work (mainly graphics), but we can't seem to decide what to use to build our site.

Our server is running on Apache, so ASP is out of the question. Coldfusion is also not supported so there goes two good database solutions down the drain. What's left? Perl and PHP (4).

PHP seems to be flexible enough for what we want to do. But then again, it would make the interaction between the main site and the forums a lot easier if we built the site using perl. Problem is, perl doesn't have a database like mySQL as default, so it makes things a bit difficult.

The concept of what we want to achieve is rather simple (and has already been done before), but complicated to do. There are many examples out there of which Skinz.org is probably the closest one we can find to match our ideas. We want to give users the possibility to upload their graphics (and other creative content) onto the server, be inserted into a database (which would make searching, classifying etc. a lot easier) and finally displayed on the site when required. We'd also like to some how merge the main site and the forums together, but that would pretty much be to hard to do, not to mention probably impossible due to the license agreement of UBB (I imagine, dunno though). We'd like to use UBB for the comments and our main site for the display (close to what UBBDev has achieved). It's not pretty to have two different (yet same) sites working next to each other rather than with each other. I'm aware of [censored] , but since we paid the psychotic license for UBB over six months ago, we want to continue on using it for as long as we can. If there's no choice left at the end, I guess we'll have to switch to an alternative bulletin board. PHPBB has good potential and I'm really looking forward seeing version 2.0 come out. But for now I'd like to concentrate on what we have and not dream about something, which by the time it comes out, we'll already be waiting for something even better and end up achieving absolutely nothing in between (that's what we've been doing so far).

Any ideas or suggestions would be useful, actually they're critical. If some of this **** sounds absurd, please forgive me. I'm only learning the basics of perl and php (and by learning I really mean the first baby steps) so I don't really have the 'big picture' figured out just yet (databases, capabilities of perl and php, etc). PlastiqueWeb is composed of three guys with an idea, but with a limited know-how to develop it If building this site means sitting my ass down and reading a 1000 page book about a specific coding language, I'll do it. But hopefully I'll be able to learn at the same time as we develop this.

I want to keep this site dynamic (right now most elements like the header, footer, left and right sides of the main site's pages are inserted using SSI - but that too has its own limitations).

So please, if you can give us a hand, it'd be deeply appreciated. I'm not asking you to do any work, just point in the direction where we should be looking and perhaps give us some tips on what to do next. If you have any ciritism to make, take it easy on me. This project has been pretty hard to start up again, especially since I've built the entire site on my own

Hope to get some feedback soon...

Pe<|ce,
Phoenix.

[ April 30, 2001 12:33 AM: Message edited by: Phoenix2k ]

Hmm.. well, there's an awful lot of difficult questions there.. Don't quite know where to start.. You'll definitely need to know a lot more of all kinds of stuff than you know now, even to have an understanding of which direction you want to go. There are a lot of different ways to do similar things..

Guess we'll just have to find out as we go along... Right now we just want to get some gfx published and see what happens next.

I know for a fact that the more we planned ahead in the past, the less we actually accomplished

So I guess we should just put aside the dreaming and work on what we can actually do with our current knowledge and when needed, learn something new... Sitting down and reading a large book suddenly didn't seem like a good idea any more

Thanks for replying anyway
Pe<|ce.