Creating a Discussion Board

[crimsonsmeagol]

I am starting work on creating a website that needs to incorporate a very basic discussion board, or basically an extremely glorified blog.

The website will have some main topics..Topics will be added regularly. In response to these topics I want users to be able to post comments/opinions and discuss the topic. I want to have full control as an admin over these discussions with the ability to delete any posts. I also want to eventually add something in to keep profanity from being able to be posted. The discussion board will only be based off the topic and the users shouldn't have any control of being able to start a new discussion thread. The discussion board doesn't need any fancy features... All the users need to be able to do is post text and possibly links.

I know some basic PHP and MySQL. I also have the drive, motivation, and time to learn what I need to for this.

So basically what I need to learn is
How to create the database of users and allow sign-up, login
How to build the discussion board with my full control over it

Do you have any suggestion or know of any tutorials that can help me out?

Thank you in advance for all your help.

[Jesdisciple]

For tutorials, just Google the technical terms involved... like registration and sessions(link) (http://us.php.net/manual/en/intro.session.php), and especially PHP and/or MySQL (depending on which part you're looking for). You don't want to omit "PHP" and get an ASP tutorial, for example.

Registration requires a 'users' table, which at its simplest only contains, for each user, a user id (primary and unique), username (unique), password, and email (unique). phpMyAdmin is a great tool for setting this up.

Logging in requires sessions (http://us.php.net/manual/en/intro.session.php) and the same database.

For the forum, you'll need 'topics' and 'posts' tables. In each post's entry, identify its topic and position (e.g., the second post would have position 1), and index both fields for efficiency. Note that I've never done this before, so this is just how my first try would be.

Obviously, anything beyond the core forum features (e.g., private messaging, search) will probably require more tables.