Creating a Forum

[Someone28624]

I currently have an MSN group I run, and quite honestly, their service, while free, leaves much to be desired.

So I would like to switch to running it by myself.

Right now we have a message board, chat room, and photo gallary. I would live to keep all these features, but there are a few more things I would like to add, like RSS feeds, a calendar, and the ability to create polls. I was looking at VBulletin, and it looks nice, but it is a bit expensive for what I need, so I have switched to the idea of something free, currently PHPBB2 looks nice, though it lacks the chat room, RSS feeds, and photo gallary. While this is disappointing, I can think of alternatives for everything but the RSS feeds. I know it's customizable, but I' m not terribly familiar with PHP and know nothing about adding RSS feeds, so if anyone has any ideas, please share.

Secondly, I know I need a domain name. That's easy. I was thinking about hosting through GoDaddy.com. I see that they have their own forum and photo gallary software. Can anyone comment on this and how it is? How does it work with it being integrated into the hosting? Is it just separate software that is included for free?

If I host through GoDaddy.com, I do not need my own server, or really too much knowledge about servers, correct?

So besides software, hosting, and a domain name, do I need anything?

Finally, how do I get the forum software onto the server if I host through GoDaddy? I believe I would use an FTP program, correct? How hard is this to do?

Please help me with whatever info you can, and if I am in over my head, feel free to tell me that as well. Thanks!

 

[StimpE]

I don't know much about the reputation of GoDaddy.com, except that I remember them removing torrent related domains, but anyways, I currently get my web hosting from www.rent-hosting.com (no I'm not advertising) and I get near 99.9% Uptime, for about $7 a month. Whoever you decide to go with, you usually get dedicated server space you can upload/download files via FTP program. You can manually upload your phpbb2 files and set it all up manually, or if your service offers cPanel, you can use Fantastico and it makes it extremely easy to set up things like PHP-Nuke, PHPBB2, and the like. Using an FTP Program is pretty easy and straight forward, I started off using SmartFTP, but soon switched to CuteFTP because I liked the features more.

As for RSS Feeds and customizing your forum, I know extremely litltle about php coding, so you might want to direct your questions towards Sniper.

Good luck~