How to Create a Forum With HTML

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Casuto, and I am the director of San Francisco Computer Tutors here in San Francisco, California. Okay. In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to create an online forum. So here on this screen, we're looking at an example of a forum for hardware and software developers. And you can see what an example looks like. So the first thing you need to do is actually get yourself a domain name. You have to buy a domain name. Think about what you want the address to be. So maybe it should pertain to what you're dealing with. Maybe it could be your name, it could be the topic area, it could be any number of things. So you can go to a variety of different places to find out. The one that I've chosen here is one called aplus.net. They will actually give you your domain name and also host it for you. I've used them plenty of times, and I find them to be very helpful, definitely affordable, and just easy to use, I find that. So other ones are, like, GoDaddy. You can go to godaddy.com. You can go to register.com. There are countless other ones out there. So you can go here. You can get your domain name, and you can also get your hosting. So once you have your hosting, the next thing you need to do that's going to be important is you want to get...you want to create a MySQL database for your forum. When I say MySQL, that's M-Y-S-Q-L, okay? That's database language. So what you'll do is you'll actually get it from your server. When you sign up for aplus.net, you're going to sign up for a particular type of account that's going to allow you to get to have access to a MySQL script. So when you sign up, just ask them that information and they'll go ahead and set it up for you. And then the next thing you're going to want to do after you get that MySQL script from them is you're going to want to choose a forum script for your website. There are a large number of forum scripts to choose from, and the three most popular are vBulletin, phpBB, as in boy, boy. And then the Simple Machines Forum. VBulletin carries an annual fee for the use of their software, but the money is used to hire professional developers to constantly work on improving the forum script. So let me just go ahead and take you to a Google search I've done here and you can see here's vBulletin Instant Community. It features templates, important messages from other symptoms...excuse me, systems, email notifications, user profiles, et cetera. And then you can download it right from here or you can go right to their page. So you can see there's actually going to be templates for you to download as well. So...and like I said, you can also go to phpBB, which is just another scripting language. And then once you get the script, you install it in your forum, okay? And then you're going to...when you do that, if you don't have a Dreamweaver or something like that in order to bring the script in, there's something called SmartFTP, and you can see here. FTP stands for file transfer protocol, so it's a free program that you download and you can put in all of the coding and everything like that into it, and then you can be up and running just like that. So after you've installed all of your scripts and everything in there, then you can figure your forum, okay? Then you actually just kind of put in how you want to bring in all your different images. You can basically put in all the content that you'd like, and just basically really, really customize it. And you do that after you've created your forum, you go ahead and log in as the administrator of...the one that you are, since you started it. And then at that point, it's ready to be used by the general public. All right. Well, hope you had as much fun as I did. Feel free to contact me anytime at dave@D-E-Y-E-C, that's D-E-Y-E-C.com, and you can check me out on the Web also at D-E-Y-E-C.com. Thanks, and have a great day."