Forum Software Help

[Unholy Prayer]

I'm making my own forum for my website and I wanted to make subforums.  I was wondering if I should make a whole separate database table or if I should just add an extra field in the forums table?  Anyone know the best way to do this?

[fert]

Here's how i do it

TABLE forums

title TEXT

description TEXT

rank_level INT

 

TABLE subforums

title TEXT

description TEXT

rank_level INT

forum TEXT

 

 

[Unholy Prayer]

Hmm... I'll give it a try.

[redbullmarky]

personally i'd go with the adding of a new field - i.e, parent_id - and keep all the forums and subforums in the same table. This way, if you decided (for example) to add a 'forum description', or perform a restructure, then you're only handling a single table and not two.

 

Also when it comes to dealing with stuff like posts/topics/forum permissions, etc, having a single, consistent table will be much easier to code for.

 

id
active (ENUM, y or n)
parent_id
title
description
...etc...

[mb81]

personally i'd go with the adding of a new field - i.e, parent_id - and keep all the forums and subforums in the same table. This way, if you decided (for example) to add a 'forum description', or perform a restructure, then you're only handling a single table and not two.

 

Also when it comes to dealing with stuff like posts/topics/forum permissions, etc, having a single, consistent table will be much easier to code for.

 

id
active (ENUM, y or n)
parent_id
title
description
...etc...

 

I agree with this, just assign a parent_id of 0 to all top level forums, then all others can use the unique id as their parent id. One of my big projects right now uses XMB forums and that's the way they do it. I have also used it for a simplified structure for a resource browser that uses a directory structure.

 

The subforum table is very discouraged, because what happens if you want to create sub-sub-forums, or sub-sub-sub forums. Then you are multiplying your workload.

[Liquid Fire]

yea, creating one table for all the forums i would think is the most efficient way of doing this.  I will mostly likely be build my own forum system for my project management system and that is the way i would ever consider doing the forum table.  This way you don't limit yourself on how many subforums you can have and does make coding easier besuase you will only have 1 table to deal with wether is it a top level forum and a sub forum.