Planning the Forum

In this tutorial, you will use Dreamweaver 8 and ImpAKT to build a forum application which will allow users to:

• View a list of discussion topics
• Read the messages associated to each topic
• Register an account with the forum, and upload a profile photo
• Login and logout
• Post a new message in any topic
• Reply to other messages
• Subscribe to a discussion thread (a chain of messages that are replies to an initial message)
• Receive e-mail notifications when a new message is posted in a thread they have subscribed to

Figure 1. An example of what the finished forum will look like

Before you start building the forum, please make sure that:

• You have a running database server and web server with PHP language support
• You have installed the required software: Dreamweaver and ImpAKT
• You have correctly defined a Dreamweaver site with a PHP_MySQL testing server
• You have set up the database provided with this tutorial and have created a connection to it

If you don’t satisfy one or more of the requirements from this checklist, follow the corresponding section for detailed instructions.