Peering into Phorum

2005 was my first year teaching PHP and MySQL at University and I selected a couple of students to co-author an article with me. It was no ordinary article because this was their assignment that was getting published.

Needless to say, the people that hired me were gob smacked by my achievement because not only was I getting undergraduate students published in an International Magazine but I was doing so after my first semester of teaching. I was chuffed that a mention for the article appeared on the front cover of the magazine! I was a little disappointed that we just missed out on the printed edition because the International PHP Magazine became fully electronic a few months earlier.

We used the Phorum application for our computing class at university. Our assignment was to modify the Phorum code to include a thread status, to indicate if the thread was open or closed. We thought the assignment would be a walk in the park, but we quickly learnt that some things were not meant to be easy. In this article, we will introduce you to the installation and functionality of Phorum software, its extensive feature set, and walk you through the various files that were modifed to attain our end objective.