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Forum - Help and advise

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2003 7:52 pm
by pistolfire99
Hey Guys,
I am creating my own custom 'forum' for this community website I am developing. I am only practising how-to's at the moment. The final product will be more refined and thoughtout. The link to the forums is http://www.i2l2.com/kpsnatest/xxxforum.php
What I would like to know is
#1) How can I let users add HTML in the 'textarea' of the message
#2) What other suggestions/feedback would be nice to add. The "posted by" textbox will not be present in the final version, since I will grab the session variable and add it to the database.

Messages and Forums

Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2003 9:26 pm
by VmusicV
Hi,
I am not certain if you're attempting to modify an already developed forum like phpBB? or you're creating a forum on your own. There's certainly a lot to be said for not
reinventing the wheel

At a conceptual level.... the textarea box in these forums has an interface that allows users to enter a
pseudo
code or html to format things like bold, italics, underline etc. OK... so I'm guessing you know that, you've made a post on a phpBB. The form uses javascript to add the tag values to the text box.

Then these are stored in the database - I would suggest storing the correct html tags. For example don't store [ b ] - instead store < b > - I hope my example comes out and doesn't get taken out because I used tags. If you store them in the database the you don't have to translate them when you display the post. I believe (don't know) it's preformated text.

Hope That Gives Some Direction or Ideas to Think About