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Nukewarz What would you think needs to be added to improve this site (design wise). There has been a lot of work put into it and now im really wanting it to be semi perfect.

Any recommendations for a nice simple php forum seeing as i already have a users database.

tyler
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Are you looking for ready made php forum? I may suggest MyBB which is really simple to manage and edit and it's quite extensible. Or you could try phpBB, which is tougher in personalization but very solid and powerful. If I dint' get the 'question' wrong..

Damien Pirsy
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  • i think you may have XD. I'm wondering if there is a forum out there that'd be easy to integrate with my current site. MY site already has users so it'd be to late to take phpBB and then build my site onto it. – tyler Jan 29 '11 at 14:25
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    MyBB is pretty friendly, I'm using it myself. And i easily built a login system on my site that takes the user from the forum database, doing the revers can be a bit more difficult unless you fill out all other necessary fields in MyBB mybb_users table – Damien Pirsy Jan 29 '11 at 14:55
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I think you may have forgotten to post the link?

Regarding the forums, what format is your users database already in. For example, do you have some sort of CMS functionality where you have captured user's data, do you have an Excel spreadsheet, Facebook fan page etc.? In other words, how is your user data currently stored?

EDIT - sorry, this was too long to go in the comment field

Data is stored in a mysql database when a user register

So it's some sort of custom form which captures the user info into a database? If you have less than a couple of thousand users and you only need to do this once, probably the easiest thing to do would be to export your users out from the database into a CSV file - see How to output MySQL query results in CSV format? or just use PHPMyAdmin depending on your level of file access.

Many open-source forum softwares (e.g. PHPBB and Phorum) have the ability to import a CSV file, so all you'd have to do then is get a template for your import CSV file, and copy your user data with the correct formatting into this. MyBB (mentioned by Damien) seems fine, and already has some merge functionality - see http://www.mybb.com/downloads/merge-system - I'm not sure if this would suit you though since you haven't identified an existing software (i.e. you might need to write a custom importer).

One trick I have learned is to create a user in any given database driven software (e.g. PHPBB), and export the appropriate user table to CSV using the technique I just mentioned (or using the built in functions in PHPMyAdmin). You can then use this as the template, and then read the data back ito the database, see Import CSV to MySQL . This can be a hit-and-miss technique depending on how many dependant tables there are for the user table.

Community
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Aaron Newton
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  • Hmm my link didnt pop up, let me fix that. Data is stored in a mysql database when a user registers. – tyler Jan 29 '11 at 14:32