Forum

[stevenar]

I've been looking on Elance for someone to make me a forum but their charging me $1200 bucks. Cheapest bid was 600 :x .

If anyone knows a good programmer that you have used in the past please let me know :) It would help a lot.

 

[lssolutions]

Depends on what language you're wanting the solution to be programmed in.

If you have no preference, I find scriptlance.com really good.

I haven't tried rentacoder.com but that's another resource.to check out.

Cheers,
Frank

 

[adrian]

Why would you want a forum made?? PHPBB and VBulletin are two of the best out there already... and customizable.

 

[stevenar]

I have no idea how to customize it.

 

[lssolutions]

You can get someone from scriptlance to set one of the free forum scripts that Adrian mentioned above and then customize it for you.

It would be cheaper than starting from scratch.

 

[adrian]

I have no idea how to customize it.

Come on now... learn! :lol:

Then you won't have to pay anyone now or in the future... what kind of customization do you not know how to do?

 

[stevenar]

lol

I just bought some PHP/MySQL lessons on CD. HAPPY NOW???

 

[adrian]

lol

I just bought some PHP/MySQL lessons on CD. HAPPY NOW???

Well.......... I meant learn for free....... but that will do I guess lol

What did you want to customize... the header graphic... forum style? etc..

 

[stevenar]

I lied i didn't buy it. heh heh heh

I'm not sure. I guess I want to customize everything. If you look at World of Warcraft's Forum. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board ... 0001&sid=1

I think that looks awesome. I can design something cool like that, i just need to know how to put my graphics into it.

How would I make my forum width 750 pixels wide? or How do i create a yellow border around the entire forum. Stuff like that.

I guess once i understand the principals of coding in PHP everything starts to click in your brain. HTML was very confusing at first but once i understand how to format the code.. everything just made sense. Hopefully its the same with PHP.

 

[adrian]

I would have to look for that myself :)

I'll keep you posted.

 

[sean06]

I lied i didn't buy it. heh heh heh

hehe.

That forum does look pretty cool. I find it hard to believe that someone would want $600 to just customise a forum for you. Surely it would only take a couple of hours if you knew what you were doing?

 

[stevenar]

Yes thats what i think too! I did get a bid of 200 tonight. I looked at their portfolio and their forums look almost default.. the colors are just different.
:((((( oh well.

I had a PHP book recommended to me by the pros at www.experts-exchange.com so i bought it.. just realized it was 950 pages. hah im screwed.

 

[cchhita]

Hi Stevenar!

How are you going with the skinning of your Forum?
What forum software are you using?

I have a bit of experience of skinning forums (PHPBB etc), and it is not that difficult. It is definitely not $600 worth of difficult :P

I have done this kind of thing for about $100 for clients before.

Just let us know what you are using, and what you want to do!

Cheers
Chirag

 

[stevenar]

wuw theres forum software? lol

I want to design a forum on photoshop then learn how to plug in the graphics to the forum. I also want things like my own customized username/password creation box and learn to put it in a different spot of the forum (instead of the typical bottom area)

There are a couple features i want to add to make people want to post as much as possible such as a ranking feature... if they get 100 posts they get a rank of "Knight" or "Peasant" below their avatar or something like that. Or a digg style feature where people can give them points for useful posts and when they get a certain amount of points they will rank up. Then ill make the medal nice and shiny so they all want it :)

I did not ask for all this in elance btw. I just asked for a phpbb forum and asked them to customize it :x

 

[adrian]

wuw theres forum software? lol

I want to design a forum on photoshop then learn how to plug in the graphics to the forum. I also want things like my own customized username/password creation box and learn to put it in a different spot of the forum (instead of the typical bottom area)

There are a couple features i want to add to make people want to post as much as possible such as a ranking feature... if they get 100 posts they get a rank of "Knight" or "Peasant" below their avatar or something like that. Or a digg style feature where people can give them points for useful posts and when they get a certain amount of points they will rank up. Then ill make the medal nice and shiny so they all want it :)

I did not ask for all this in elance btw. I just asked for a phpbb forum and asked them to customize it :x

You can log into the phpbb admin area to assign ranks for "x" amount of posts... as for integrating Photoshop stuff.... I am not sure how to do that myself either.

 

[stevenar]

oohh very cool that part should be easy then.

 

[stevenar]

cchhita, do you know how to take my design from photoshop and design it that way? If you do I could just pay you :)

 

[cchhita]

Hi Stevenar,

2 Ways to do this:

1) slice images and use CSS/PHP files to style your PHPBB forum.
OR
2) Create a Joomla Site (and use your photoshop file to create a Joomla Tempalte), and use the PHPBB bridge to incorporate the two.

The advantage of the second one is that you can create a site around your forum, and incorporate a lot more features.

Another reason is that if you go for Option 2) I can help you out more because I have a lot more experience Skinning Joomla than I do PHPBB.

The cool thing about using the Joomla Bridge, is that your PHPBB forum will use the Joomla template you created. (I Hope I havent confused you with all this!!).

But I am more than happy to help out either way.
Let me know if I have confused you.
Cheers
Chirag

 

[stevenar]

Oooh i like option 2. I was planning on remaking my site using joomla so visitors can get a username/password and comment on all my news updates and guides and also use their login to access the forums. But i had the same problem... i didn't know how to stick my graphics into the templates. I didn't know how to rearrange the modules and customizing them either.

Chirag, maybe you can help me setup my site with Joomla? I have it installed and my website is *broken link* How shall I begin? Probably by arranging the modules im guessing? How do i do this and once thats done how do i make them the correct size and what files do i need to open to setup the code to point to the correct graphics. I have many questions but I guess I would like to start with that :P

And thank you for wanting to helping me! :D

 

[adrian]

Hi Stevenar,

2 Ways to do this:

1) slice images and use CSS/PHP files to style your PHPBB forum.
OR
2) Create a Joomla Site (and use your photoshop file to create a Joomla Tempalte), and use the PHPBB bridge to incorporate the two.

The advantage of the second one is that you can create a site around your forum, and incorporate a lot more features.

Another reason is that if you go for Option 2) I can help you out more because I have a lot more experience Skinning Joomla than I do PHPBB.

The cool thing about using the Joomla Bridge, is that your PHPBB forum will use the Joomla template you created. (I Hope I havent confused you with all this!!).

But I am more than happy to help out either way.
Let me know if I have confused you.
Cheers
Chirag

This is interesting.......... I might use option #2 later for a site I am doing Chirag.... if you decide to help stevenar with this could you post it in the forum so we may all see? Mark or perhaps include that in an update? How to skin Joomla/phpbb with your photoshop designs?

 

[stevenar]

YES an update on skinning sites with Joomla, GOOD IDEA! Starring Chirag ;)

I would say make an update on skinning Forums too but i think in most cases a default template would be fine for everyone. Not everyone has a gaming site like me :(. But you can make a update for skinning forums too, just for me. I'll send you some chocolate or something.

 

[cchhita]

Great!
If Everyone is interested, I would be more than happy to help out here!

I have a standard template I use as a base for all my Joomla sites. It is probably not the cleanest, or the most efficient, but it does the trick, and I have built over 25 Joomla sites!

If you havent seen it already, I have a demo site up where people can go have a play with Joomla.
You can go to joomla.goinglarge.org

To login to the admin section, go to: joomla.goinglarge.org/administrator
username and password are both admin.

I guess I can get stared with creating a tutorial with installing Joomla, installing some useful components, and installing a new template! and we can skin it from there!

Will start a new thread for this I think :D

 

[stevenar]

Mark,

You have a lot of videos about the most important stuff SEO, Sales pages, Adwords, etc and I can't imagine you having many more ideas for updates.. you should be running low.

Even though your sites how to teach people how to make money by ranking well on google and making good sales pages and others.. I think some updates about the technical stuff such as Web Design, HTML, CSS, Proper layouts (important for conversions), and even advanced stuff like Skinning Forums and Joomla sites could help a ton of people here. If you just take a quick scan of the posts thoughout the forums you can see a lot of people having problems with making their site and people that finally DO get their site up have layouts that just wont make them much money and sites that aren't to friendly on the eyes. In some cases a nice professional looking site can be as important as a good sales page and useful content.

Personally, when i see an ugly site I click off and find another. Maybe thats just me.

 

[stevenar]

Awesome Chirag, Sounds good :D.

I think they covered how to install Joomla and components in last months update so if you want you can skip that.

 

[adrian]

Skinning a PHPBB is my want.