Developing Forum Software

Don't you think you are wanting to much(that too with calling yourself 0 in maths)?
Anyways my advice is:
1.First get the hang of PHP, MySQL and other web technologies.
2.Start with simple web applications, eg. storing comments in a database.
3.Get real, get into existing open source programs.
Even after all this, i can not say you will be ready for what you want.
Vinayak

No,i don't think i am Going too much!!
I want to learn how to Build Forum Software,is Learning new Thing called Wanting Too much??

Completely agree with vinayakgarg.

Packages like vBulletin have years and years of development by a team of developers.

But don't get discouraged. Put the time in and learn the tools you'll need and you'll be creating great applications before you know it. But, you have to learn the tools first.

Which Tools you are Mentioning Dude?

A tutorial: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-create-a-phpmysql-powered-forum-from-scratch/

I want it to be Commercial man!!not Open Source,like Vbulletin is Charging for what they Provide.

If you are so anxious to write another vBulletin, maybe you should do a bit of research to understand what you are getting into. For starters, the history of vBulletin itself:

In 1999, [1] James E. Limm and John Percival were running a Visual Basic website using Infopop's UBB.classic forum software on VB Forums.[2] As their site grew, they noticed that their software, written in Perl using a flat-file database, could not always cope with the number of users they had. In February 2000, the two decided that it would be better to write their own solution as both were unfamiliar with the software's code and thus unable to optimize it. Initially, it was designed solely as a rewrite of UBB, in PHP using MySQL, and was meant only for their own forum. Other UBB owners expressed interest in the solution, and they offered to sell it to Infopop, but their proposal was rejected. As there was still a demand for the software, Limm and Percival created Jelsoft and released their work as a paid solution, called vBulletin 1.

After subsequent minor releases of their software, the two decided to start working on a new version that would be more than a rewrite of UBB: they wanted to turn their software into a competitive solution for forums. Rewriting the entirety of the product, vBulletin 2 commenced development. Shortly thereafter, Limm became the managing director and Percival the lead developer. To help with the scale of the project, two additional developers, Freddie Bingham and Mike Sullivan were brought on to help finish vBulletin 2. Kier Darby was brought on during the vBulletin 2.0 Beta phase to further development. The release of vBulletin 2 proved to be very successful and is what made vBulletin popular.

I strongly suggest that you read the rest at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBulletin

A couple of key things to note:
1. It has been under development for 10+ years and that has included some major re-writes.

2. It started out as a 2 man operation but fairly quickly needed a larger team.

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If you are going to develop something with commercial value, then it needs to be done in a professional manner and it needs to have some unique value such that people will be prepared to pay for it. That means that the developer(s) need both technical and business skills as well as the time / numbers to produce the scale that is required. Having the business skills includes the ability to properly size the project, assess the competition and determine if there is commercial potential or not. A number of systems such as vBulletin have had the benefit of being the first / best into a particular market and they have survived as a commercial product despite having a number of competitors with free products. This would also apply to Microsoft Office but it's dominance is being eroded over time.

There are quite a number of Open Source Forum Systems (i.e. free) that you can easily find and download (e.g. phpBB, Phorum, SMF and others). If you were to build a forum system that you wanted to sell, what would make your solution so good / unique that potential users would want to buy your solution instead of using one of the free solutions?

Projects are often estimated based on the expected number of lines of code, the complexity of the code and the skill of the developers. You can also do this in reverse to get a feel for the amount of development work that was required to produce something that already exists. As an example, I did a quick "lines of code" count for the SMF forum system. It came to 263,174 not including the 104,000 in the theme and excluding any measure of the work involved in all of the graphic files. According to the theory, for a system this size, the average productivity for a developer is about 2500 lines of code per year even though it could be as high as 15,000 - 20,000 / year. This isn't just raw code. There has to be some design and planning time and the code has to be tested and documented. Part of the cost is the fact that the larger the project gets, the more people you need and the more coordination and management is needed.

Let's assume that we have a single developer and this guy is a real whiz and he can produce 15,000 lines of debugged, documented code per year. Simple math tells us that it will take him 17.5 years to develop something equivalent to SMF. That's probably assuming a normal work week so if he works 7 days per week he can probably create graphic files and themes and plugins on the weekends and at night. 15,000 lines of code per year may seem like an unrealistically low rate of production but in fact, it is probably unrealistically high. By the time 2029 comes around and he's ready to release Version 1 (if things went exceptionally well), today's processors, operating systems and technology such as PHP and MySQL won't be state of the art so it will probably be time to start the first re-write for Version 2! In reality, it's probably had to happen along the way so it's probably going to take even longer to get Version 1 completed. Meanwhile vBulletin, SMF and all the other forums will have morphed into something more or disappeared so the whole competitive landscape may have drastically changed. Thus, after working 7 days per week for at least 17 1/2 years with no income or time for much of anything else, there is no guarantee at all that the product will have any commercial value. If it was easy, a lot of smart people would have already done it.

Best of luck!

Chris, great explanation!

The topic is old and I know it but I guess there are many people like the topic starter who want to create a "new Facebook" so to speak. That's why I would respond to it this way:

Why don't you start small? Write some small code here and there and then MAY be you will be ready to go big. But yeah, dream big. Software development is not an easy thing. Otherwise, hire a good software development company and they will do the work for you :) Just Google them and you will find many.