CrudeForum

A very simple, crude and insecure web dicussion forum developed using PHP. Store data in text files in back-end.

Originally forked from github.com/stupidsing/crude_forum but changed drastically since.

Prerequisites

The installation depends on composer. Install composer to your system $PATH.

Development

All style changes should be done in forum.scss and built by sass. To setup for development:

Install nodejs to your system. The package manager npm will be installed along.
Then with npm, install sass to anywhere in your $PATH. Probably with this command:

npm install -g sass

Basic Install

Getting the project files

First, install CrudeForum into the folder myForum (which you may rename as you see fit):

composer create-project --prefer-dist crude-forum/crude-forum myForum

Note: If you do not have sass prior to running the composer create-project command, you'd need to run the composer build command to rebuild static assets after install:

composer run build

Web server configurations

Then setup your web server to use document of the full path to myForum/public. Please remember to setup your server to route to myForum/public/index.php by default.

For Nginx, assuming you have $document_root points to myForum/public, this means to have something like this in your config:

location /  {
    ...
    fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root/index.php;
    ...
}

For Apache, please remember to setup AllowOverride all in the appropriate Directory section so the .htaccess file can work for you. Probably something like this:

<VirtualHost "my-forum.com">
    DocumentRoot "/home/to/myForum/public"
    <Directory "/home/to/myForum/public">
        AllowOverride all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Should all the setup correct, you can now browse your forum in browser.

Alternative Installation

For some legacy hosting environment, you might not be able to do path rewrite as modern PHP routing requires.

CrudeForum support multiple routing strategies. For that, you may reference the examples:

Development

Simply clone this repository. You can run crude forum with modern PHP 7.1+ command line tools:

composer dev

which effectively runs php -S localhost:8080 -t ./public.

If you want to continuously develop the CSS stylesheet, you may consider to use the watch mode of node-sass:

composer watch

Both watch and build requires [node-sass]. You may supply additional argument by using the -- syntax. For example, to watch and build asset with embeded source map: