Forum

A basic PHP web forum created for a course project.

Installation

This site requires SSI support, MariaDB/MySQL, PHP 7, and mysqli.

On Debian, this should get you most of the packages you need:

apt install php php-fpm php-mysql mariadb

Make sure to enable/reload the relevant services in your init system.

nginx

I recommend nginx as a web server. To enable PHP and SSI on nginx (based on the default site config file):

• Point nginx's site root to your clone of this repository and check the file permissions
• Uncomment the location ~ \.php$ block in your site config file
  • Uncomment the first fastcgi_pass (for php-fpm)
  • Add ssi on;
• Add index.php to the index directive

Database

• Create a database named forum
• Create a user named forum at localhost with the password ah2BSrY3P3pprRrm
• Give the forum user access to the forum database
• Import the database schema from this repo: mysql forum < forum.sql

For security, make sure to use forum@localhost and ensure that logging in from an external client is blocked.

Features

• Topics and posts submitted by users and persisted with MySQL
• User accounts with a username, password, and display name
• Responsive interface
  • Scales for desktop and mobile use
  • Respects prefers-color-scheme
  • Expand and collapse posts
• Localized dates
• Error handling
• Security measures
  • mysqli prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
  • htmlentities to sanitize HTML input and prevent cross-site scripting (XSS)
• No frameworks

Non-Features

As a course project, this forum has very limited scope. Below are some features that could be added but are not present in this implementation.

• Search
• Email verification of accounts
• User profiles (avatars, bios, etc.)
• Moderation features
• Voting on posts/topics
• Replies to specific posts
• Categories/subforums

License

This software is licensed under the MIT License.