Can someone please help program a forum for us?

[Karlos]

Can you not find a snapshot of an older version of xoops?

[Karlos]

@Argo

The PHP5 problems wouldn't be so bad if they could get hosting on a dedicated server somewhere, but that'll be expensive.

A few years ago we had our Underground Arcade forum where many of us could come together and discuss our game ideas, help each other out, and we were actually making progress! Then suddenly the host for our site was gone, and we lost everything.

Do you have anything of the old site? Even if all you have is a database dump, I've gained some experience over the years in migrating data from one system to another.

[Karlos]

Suprised this thread hasn't mysteriously vanished.

Really, why is that?

[Karlos]

So, is it a figment of our imagination that it's still here?

@Cammy

Developing a new forum from scratch would be pretty time consuming. Creating a non-css template for an existing forum engine would seem to be a more sensible idea. Alas, that can also be a bit feature-restrictive. CSS isn't just used for presentation but in conjunction with javascript is used to implement a lot of features that you might take for granted.

[Karlos]

I figured cost would be an issue and dedicated server hosting would not be an option. Which is why I recommended the host I use.
One time $50 for lifetime hosting.

It's real a long shot, but I wonder if the powers that be at amigaworld.net would let them have a subdomain on their dedicated box (or at least last time I checked they were using a virtual server) ? Then they can use an older version of xoops that's nice and ibrowse-friendly.

Not much to lose by asking; they can only say no, at the end of the day.

[Karlos]

@Cammy

Most CMS use template based systems. The templates are small bits of code in separate files that represent the actual structure of the pages and the content (from your database, image files etc) is inserted into it to generate the final HTML, which is then sent to your browser.

A complete set of templates usually comprises a theme. It ought to be possible to create one which uses old HTML attributes in the template markup to set colours and such and strip out as much of the CSS as possible. You don't need to rewrite the whole CMS, thankfully.

[Karlos]

My point is, when you use a CMS that supports mobile, you merely create anything like template.  You only force content to some compact form (i.e. HTML only) by picking proper cellphone "generation" (there's just several of them and all should be defined).  And then you bind it with an ambiguous user agent that can of course, be other browser.

No, I got that. However, most of those templates aren't necessarily that great for fullscreen browsing and they usually contain "clean" (or cleanish) HTML, free from the old HTML2/3 formatting stuff that iBrowse and the like actually use for presentation.

Either way, you are going to have to do some customisation by hand, whether you choose a mobile template to start with or not.

[Karlos]

Or you could just install vbulletin and I'll give you a copy of the proxy code :-)

Slight issue with that being that vbulletin isn't free and the proxy is, well, incomplete to say the least.

[Karlos]

We have a bunch of programmers, graphic artists and musicians lined up and waiting to get into the forum, but we still need to find someone who can program it for us, remembering that it can't use CSS so that it's compatible with IBrowse.

Without meaning to sound glib, you have programmers lined up but nobody among them that has any web application experience?

[Karlos]

Yeah, crazy as it sounds, they specialise in Blitz Basic, AmigaE and things but no one knows PHP.

Unfortunate. In my experience, most programmers end up knowing several languages and PHP is syntactically not a million miles from C.

Anyway we don't need an Amiga games development forum anymore so it doesn't matter.

Pity. I take it you have an alternative?

[Karlos]

What prevents anyone from writing a web forum in Blizz Basic or Amiga E btw? It's not like PHP is the only language of the web, to put it mildly

CGI binaries can be written in just about anything, but I suspect you'd want to use something that can produce valid binaries for your chosen server.