Web Coding Question

[Stusi]

I am looking for a way to set up a site that lets people post in categories, but won't let anyone reply. Also, the poster must sign in to post anything, but anyone (signed in or not) can view all the posts. I cant use forum software for this and basically i'm trying to do something similiar to http://www.craigslist.com Anyone got any good ideas? I normally do layouts and don't have a whole lot of experience with coding so i figured some one here might be able to help me out. I have heard some suggestions from people about using blogging software for this but i'm still skeptical on how well thats gonna work. Basically people will post advertisements for their stuff and it will have their e-mail on there. That's the goal. Any suggestions/links to some tutorials or articles would be greatly appreciated.

[calbiterol]

I don't know how practical this is, but you might be able to use PHP to write each message to a file. Each file could be the category, perhaps? Password protecting stuff like that is pretty easy. I know exactly how one would go about doing it in PHP, and if I had the time I'd go about explaining it. For now, however, it is probably a better idea to ask people's ideas on the feasability of this. The basic synopsis is that you have a write page append to a file, and the file then reads it's contents (people's posts) onto the page. In order for a new post to be made, the username/password fields must be filled in, which PHP checks against a database or usernames and passwords. If it checks out, the file is appended; if not, it isn't. You could organize the files however you wanted - each file a category, etc. To save space and loading time, it is often a good idea to have a single index page, and then call upon the content pages. In other words, your entire layout goes on one page, which calls for the page that contains the text/content. This can be done by adding the category after "filename.php" - for example, mylayout.php?bootstraps would pull up a page about bootstraps. Anyways, that part is tried and true. The part I'm unsure about is the appending part. If you aren't worried about file size / load time then it's absolutely viable; otherwise, I couldn't tell you with absolute certainty. Despite all my mindless babbling, though, I think this would be a viable solution.

Calbit

 

P.S.: Sorry 'bout all the rambling...

[Klaynos]

Why can't you use forum software to do it?

 

I'm sure that phpBB's permissions system allows you to set it up so that you have to be signed in to post, and you can only start threads and not reply...

 

If it was me and I wanted this systme I'd code it in PHP and use a database backend, probably mysql, depending how much traffic I was expecting and how big it was likely to grow.

 

Or WIKI software with a categories system? Not have much experiance with wiki softwre though :s

[Stusi]

Well my problem is i have very limited programming skills so i would love to find a program that would help me along with all the setup. As of now it looks like i'll have to find a coder for this project because not only do i have a few blurry spots on how to do stuff, but my client keeps adding features to the list which i would never have a clue on how to do. Thanks for the help though!

[mezarashi]

Yeah, it would be close to impossible to find a program that matches exactly your needs. If you do have programming skills, then the usual way to do things is to get a basic template from a forum or news publishing type of script, then hack it accordingly (giving credit to the original of course as stated in GNU licenses). I hope things work out for you though ^^;