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@pplejaxkz · Jan 5, 2008, 12:23 PM

I picked up a little side project from a cousin of mine. He is making a online car club called Tough Guys. Now this is the first website that I have made fully by myself. I am in the middle of a Web Development degree at ITT Tech, so I don't even know that much. And he doesn't know how much work can go into making a website.

With that being said, he is pushing for things to be done everyday. He is in desperate need of a Forum(he doesn't know what that is) but I have never coded a forum before. What he wants done today from me, is a page where people can post their classified car ads for free. I do not know how to do this without a forum. Is this even possible? I didn't think it is possible for someone to post thing on a page without a forum. I also need to do this with a photo gallery as well.

Now the site isn't even 30% done. He is really pushing to have something up to see, so I had to upload what I had. Any help or a push in the right direction would be very helpful. Thanks for reading my novel, fellow Mac lovers =]

besson3c · Jan 5, 2008, 12:39 PM

A forum is what this section of MacNN is. It is generally hard to integrate a forum into other pages of a website, they are usually separate entities.

If his objective is simply to allow people to post their own stuff onto a webpage, I'd suggest looking at using WordPress and utilizing its comments feature. Since I don't know if your server fulfills the necessary requirements of WP, I'll leave this for another post... Let me know!

analogue SPRINKLES · Jan 5, 2008, 12:54 PM

Remove the visual counter. That is so 1998

Faust · Jan 5, 2008, 12:54 PM

I have not come acrosss a useful classifieds script, so I think a custom solution or self-made solution would probably be the best way to go if his site is going to be a serious resource for classifieds. This option might get rather expensive, however.

Forums: You have quite a few neat options for a forum, depending on his needs. In my opinion, the best forum software is vBulletin. It is a commercial solution with rather bloated code but it is still quite good. This forum here is built on vBulletin as are most high-trafficed fora.
Other options would be SMF (I heard good things about it and it is free), phpBB, punBB and various other free or Open Source software.

Additionally (or alternatively) you may want to try out a CMS. I would recommend going with a good CMS here, too, such as ExpressionEngine (not free for commercial use), Drupal (slightly complicated), WordPress or Textpattern. All of them are good but have very different learning curves. WordPress has the lowest learning curve of the four and is probably a good option if you're not familiar with CMSes/Blogging platforms.

All of the above require you to have a database (mostly MySQL) and PHP available, so you should bear that in mind.

nonhuman · Jan 5, 2008, 12:58 PM

If all he wants is a place for people to post classified ads then all you need is a database with a text field (and probably a few other fields, but you could do it with just a text field if you really wanted to), a page with a form to let people add entries to the database, and a page that fetches the entries from the database and displays them. Presumably you'd also want some sort of authentication method to prevent just anyone from posting a classified ad, and if you wanted it to actually be a good system you'd want to collect the ads in a more structured format (with separate fields for a title, price, location, and that sort of thing), but this is really a fairly basic thing that could easily be done in an afternoon.

@pplejaxkz · Jan 5, 2008, 02:45 PM

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES

Remove the visual counter. That is so 1998

Yeah, I hate it too. I tried to talk him outta it, but he wants it.

The site does allow PHP scripts. I think I'll give Word Press a try. Thank you guys very much for the help. I will post back if I have anymore questions. Thanks again!

besson3c · Jan 5, 2008, 05:08 PM

Originally Posted by @pplejaxkz

Yeah, I hate it too. I tried to talk him outta it, but he wants it.

The site does allow PHP scripts. I think I'll give Word Press a try. Thank you guys very much for the help. I will post back if I have anymore questions. Thanks again!

If he wants website stats you should look into installing AWStats for him (your server may already have it installed). Page counter are not only tacky, but they are literally absolutely useless, as they also count page hits from search engine spiders. Besides, why would you want to expose to the general public how popular the site really is?

OwlBoy · Jan 5, 2008, 06:53 PM

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES

Remove the visual counter. That is so 1998

analogue SPRINKLES · Jan 5, 2008, 06:58 PM

Originally Posted by @pplejaxkz

Yeah, I hate it too. I tried to talk him outta it, but he wants it.

The site does allow PHP scripts. I think I'll give Word Press a try. Thank you guys very much for the help. I will post back if I have anymore questions. Thanks again!

Google Analytics

@pplejaxkz · Jan 8, 2008, 11:43 AM

I am getting very annoyed. When I edit my images to be links in Dreamweaver everything gets nudged around. I still run it in Safari and things look perfect. I startup Firefox and everything is shown as it is in dreamweaver. A complete utter mess. I've messed around with CSS using border tags. I really don't know what I am doing wrong, it seems like I've tried everything. I am thinking about redesigning and just typing in the links and using a cool font, although I won't get the cool drop shadow effect. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have a pushy cousin =[ Thanks in advanced.

Oh and I'm still in the process of getting him to stay away from a hit counter. I will check out different ways. Once again thanks for understanding my amatuerness!

besson3c · Jan 8, 2008, 11:59 AM

@pplejaxkz: your experiences with Dreamweaver justifies to me hand coding. It's the way to go if you really want to do this job properly, IMHO. Personally, I prefer just taking control and coding myself rather than cleaning up what Dreamweaver comes up with, but regardless, cleaning is required as you are discovering, so learning HTML code is rather inescapable.

mdc · Jan 8, 2008, 12:16 PM

In your css file add img { border: none; }
That will take care of the blue borders that you see on image links in Firefox and Internet explorer and should do a good job of the layout in Firefox.

Once you're happy with how the site looks in Safari and Firefox, you'll need to open Internet Explorer 7 on a PC and then start working with your HTML and CSS to get it working in Internet Explorer 7, then repeat the same thing for Internet Explorer 6.
Once IE6 looks fine, make sure IE7 still looks fine, and then back to Safari and Firefox.

There's isn't any better time than the present to start learning HTML

OwlBoy · Jan 8, 2008, 12:20 PM

Originally Posted by mdc

Once you're happy with how the site looks in Safari and Firefox, you'll need to open Internet Explorer 7 on a PC and then start working with your HTML and CSS to get it working in Internet Explorer 7, then repeat the same thing for Internet Explorer 6.
Once IE6 looks fine, make sure IE7 still looks fine, and then back to Safari and Firefox.

There's isn't any better time than the present to start learning HTML

I just went though this, I was surprised at how off things can in IE when things look exactly the same in Firefox and Safari when it comes to CSS. IE Sucks

@pplejaxkz · Jan 8, 2008, 12:45 PM

I am pretty fluent when it comes to HTML. It's pretty much the only language that I know pretty well. A little JS too, but no too much. I may have to give hand coding a try. I just have to clean up the site now, so that it at least looks presentable. Thanks a lot guys for the input! I will most likely be posting more at this rate =] Thanks again!

andi*pandi · Jan 8, 2008, 12:47 PM

^IE most certainly does.

in addition to what mdc suggested, I would put this in the css:

a img {border: none;}

(it's a little more specific to links, and since the border doesn't show up until there's a link...)

any "cool font" you could use for text links would have to be installed on the user's computer for them to see it.

Mrjinglesusa · Jan 8, 2008, 12:52 PM

Tough_Guys_Sliced is locally owned and oporated in upstate New York"

Really? Oporated? Don't you have spell check?

mdc · Jan 8, 2008, 01:07 PM

Originally Posted by OwlBoy

I just went though this, I was surprised at how off things can in IE when things look exactly the same in Firefox and Safari when it comes to CSS. IE Sucks

It's awful.
My company asked me to put a single page together to show off something and just that took hours of IE7 and IE6 work. Besides the horrible CSS support, IE6 can't display transparency in .png images so you have to either use client-side scripting to fix them or create ugly .gifs for IE6 users.

Thankfully almost no one uses IE5 anymore since that doesn't even support Google Maps. If you have a Google Map on your site it just doesn't load in IE5 since Google's default Javascript uses an ifBrowserCompatible if but there isn't anything like "Please update your browser because it isn't compatible with Google Maps" in their sample code. Another thing that took me some time to figure out why the map wasn't showing up.

Needless to say, I'm hoping Microsoft doesn't push IE8 as Vista only.

@pplejaxkz · Jan 8, 2008, 05:26 PM

Originally Posted by Mrjinglesusa

Really? Oporated? Don't you have spell check?

I just posted what he wrote directly into the html page. It still is my fault because I should have double checked it.

I am at school now and working on it for the next few hours. i am hoping to have everything squared away before I leave.