Inside Technique : Adding Discussion Forums
By Scott Isaacs

In part II of our membership and personalization series, we are going to enhance the membership database introduced in our first article with a flexible discussion forum built using SQL Server and ASP. By the end of this article, you will have the knowledge and scripts necessary to add multiple forums to your web-site.

We are going to create a discussion forum with the following features:

• Unlimited number of forums
• Unlimited number of single-threaded topics per forum (easily extended to full-threading)
• Automatic page-chunking of topics
• Integration with the Site Membership table
• Easy Administration Features
  • Add/ Edit/ Remove Forums
  • Quickly Edit/ Delete any Message

The Discussion Forum is built using the same methodology as the Site Membership database. All logic that manipulates the database is contained within stored procedures and database triggers. The ASP scripts are simply a middle tier for interfacing the user with the database. The front-end client is a simple, script-free HTML user-interface.

On the last page you will be able to download all the necessary SQL scripts and sample files to start adding site membership and discussion forums. These scripts were run and tested against IIS 4.0 with SQL Server 6.5. If you are familiar with SQL you should be able to adapt them for other SQL backends.

Before digging into the details, we explain at a high-level how you can interface with the discussion forum.

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