Note: My website search engine, MiniSearch, is now capable of search messages in this forum.
Version 1.01
I was alerted to a potential security vaulnerablity in this script. A simple fix has been provided in v1.01.
This is the Perl script that I wrote for the discussion forum on my DHTML tutorial site, The Dynamic Duo. Many people had asked where I got the script, so I decided to release it as freeware under the GNU General Public License. This means the script (actually the 2 scripts) can be freely used or modified by anyone, so long as it remains public domain. If you add substantial new features to these scripts you must release the source code either to myself directly, or on your own website - please e-mail me if you do.
Features:
Demos:
See The Forum In Action (feel free to post messages to see how it works)
you can also take a look at my Dynamic Duo DHTML Forum for an idea of how it will look when you get lots of messages and how you can customize it to suit your own site - but please do not post test messages in this forum.
Downloads
dforum-1.10.zip (Windows)
dforum-1.10.tar.gz (Unix)
forum-1.0.sea (MacIntosh/MacPerl)
Instructions
There's just 2 files that are used:
forum.pl - main script
forum-admin.pl - administration script (for deleting/editing messages)
If you don't know how to run Perl scripts I'd suggest reading up on Perl and CGI, or buy a book on the subject. Generally all you'll have to do is to edit the set-up variables in the files, put them in your cgi-bin directory, chmod them to 755, and they should work fine. When you post messages to the forum, it will automatically create all the necessary data files it needs.
Feel free to go through the source code and customize the colors or whatever to suit your site. There are 2 sub-routines that print the header and footer for the pages, they are named printHeader and printFooter and are located at the end of each script. Wherever convienent I used the print <<"EOF" command so that you can edit the HTML in the scripts directly and not have to worry about putting \'s everywhere. This should make customization a breeze.
Extensions to DForum
Ted Hawkins has done further work on these scripts, and created Forum 2. It's much more up to date than my version and comes with a configuration script to make installation easier. Definitely worth trying out, thanks for providing them Ted!
Dan Steinman
www.dansteinman.com