Forum script for travel site

will have advice on hotels, destinations, etc

[orion_rus]

I like this type of forum, but i realising a travel server, where would be many advices and reports about hotels and so on, and when i select an hotel, i shall see information and forum only about this hotel, how is the best way to realize it? save it in the database, files, or now have much better ways?
Thanks alot all for answering

[mincklerstraat]

Orion,

You've posted before about your plans for a travel site and wanting an appropriate CMS - so I'll comment on that here, too.

Just about any CMS you deal with will have multiple ways of organizing articles - for example, in *nukes, they're usually organizable as 'categories' and 'topics'. Let's just deal with topics now, but remember that it's good to have multiple organizational principles for your articles/information.

You can tie in a forum to a CMS by making the 'forum number' correspond to the 'topic number' of the CMS. Each time you create a new topic for your CMS, say, a 'hotel this or that', you create a new forum in your forum board with the same number, that also corresponds to that hotel.

You find a place in your CMS where you can then make a link to the forum board, just using the topic number and the basic url structure for your forum numbers.

Of course, you can do this with galleries too (if they're numbered), and any type of other script that categorizes things into numbers.

Your problem is that you'll probably have a few hundred or more hotels, and you usually don't want that many forums / topics, unless you have a very, very ambitious plan.

Another thing you could do is just use a *nuke-like CMS that allows 'comments', and just have one article per hotel, and allow users to post comments on each hotel. This would probably be a better solution since it can be so hard to get people to respond to 'empty' looking sites, and having a separate forum for each hotel would certainly contribute to that empty looking feeling.

I have the feeling that the coding part of this might be a pretty ambitious task for you; it might be better to get something modest off the ground first, see how it goes, and then think about expanding functionality later. Usually this is bad advice if you're already an experienced coder/webmaster, since it's easier to get everything done at once; but learning-while-you-go will provide you with a wealth of practical information and could prevent you from launching an over-ambitious project that fails because the initial planning and experience wasn't there. Sorry to sound harsh, but a whole lot of ambitious internet projects go bottom-up.

Whatever you do, I wish you success and hope you don't pull out too much hair on your way there!

[orion_rus]

Thanks, your kindness is so great, i'm very glad what you was so kind for me. I know about programming much, i finish a school where i study languages and in university i have experience, i don't know php but it seems like c, and i think i don't have any problems with it, i planning to save comments in the dbm base. And detach messages when user see the information. I don't know how to make a forum, but i think i could do it, after some experience, or code samples, before u sad what it's rather hard, i think it's simple) but know i think about it, and you right, it's not so easy and may be i take already prepared forum. Thank u so much.
About project, in russian word rest - it's very popular, and i hope it would be good and big profit project

[edited by: jatar_k at 8:34 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2004]
[edit reason] removed specific site [/edit]