This has been a long time dream of mine.I read a lot of books, sometimes really old and out-of-mainstream books. I want to build a forum where likeminded people would propose book ideas, review them etc and others can talk about that book. I also wanted to expand this to movies, Video games etc. I installed vBulletin engine and it does most of the work to start a community portal. Now, I want to customise the portal.

I want to have some additional inputs when a user creates a brand new post. For instance I read a book today at Barnes and Nobles and want to write about it. So I click on the new post link. The page should provide me with options for "author", "Title", "Publisher" etc. Same for movies. Also, the next step would be to provide some form of mechanism for the users to see reviews from Amazon, CNET etc directly on the first response posted automatically after the user posts his review.

I am willing to put up the time needed for coding. I just need to know if similar things have been tried before. I am assuming that is the case. I request you good folks to guide me in the right direction. Remeber, I will write my own code, no need of any help there. Just need to know what has to be coded.

Thanks in advance.

Recommended Answers

All 2 Replies

i believe you are looking for some kind of blog... forum is more like discussion... in blog you can discuss too, but the article is the main attraction, where as in forum, the topic is the main attraction... you may consider to have CMS with both forum and blog, which might not be a good idea in term of attracting people... but still things depend on how u gonna approach to ppl.
you will get a lot of open source forums, blogs, CMS.... if you look around li'l bit, you will get good comparisons among them and can decide what you want to have for your site.
good luck with your project... i appreciate your reading habit.. :)

Thanks for yours response mate. I actually have a blog already up and running. But my idea is to have users being able to create and start threads of their own. I can't possibly read all the books out there, so I leave it to the users to come up with their own reviews. Which means, everyone should be able to start a thread of their own. vBulletin does that very efficiently, and I have it running. But I want customise it so that the key details are captured. I mean, the author, publisher, title, etc.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.