First of all, I know very little about php, nearly nothing about mysql, and absolutely nothing about security. Second, the needs for the forum I have in mind are extremely basic: no PMs, very little user info (one text box), no search, no bbcode/html (though I do want auto-linking of http:// links), no 'new thread' icons, etc. Being the lazy programmer I am, I looked around for something already made, and I found phpbb. It is easy to edit the layout, but there are so many pages, so many changes that need to be made, and so much happening behind the scenes (it is loaded with features) that I feel the best I could do would be a visual hack. Should I take the plunge and try to learn this myself? Or is there some really barebones bb software already made that I keep passing up?

hahahaha, yeah, close to it.

It does have threads, but none of the helpful/attractive features of real forums.

Quote:is there some really barebones bb software already made that I keep passing up?

PunBB and Phorum are the simplest 'proper' forum systems I've heard of, though I have no idea how easy they would be to modify to do what you're wanting.

If you know nothing about security, be extremely careful when writing anything that runs on the web - there's far too much SQL injection going on in supposedly-professional software even though it should be trivial to prevent in most cases (by using placeholders and never ever concatenating variables into SQL queries), and it's not helped at all by using PHP (with its register_globals, and magic quotes that are magic enough that you might rely on them but not magic enough to always work, and database query functions that give no option but to concatenate SQL strings and variables). But it's not that hard to learn about the problems and how to solve them, if you're willing to spend some effort on it and can write code carefully and can be sufficiently paranoid [smile]

After looking into making my own, I'm completely against the idea, and I'll just continue to chip away at phpbb. Thanks for your advice.

Yeah, I use PHPBB, too, I tried my own forum, once, in ASP, worked okay-ish, but PHPBB is a much better choice.