I need some help building a forum for my site.

[Xandhoniox]

I have a website that I'm trying to develop right now, but I can't find any information on scripting for forums. The little bit of info I could find that was slightly helpful was a different kind of forum than the one I need. I'm trying to make a roleplaying forum, and the other one was for general question/answer forums, like this one. Is there any way someone could help me out?

[oesxyl]

I have a website that I'm trying to develop right now, but I can't find any information on scripting for forums. The little bit of info I could find that was slightly helpful was a different kind of forum than the one I need. I'm trying to make a roleplaying forum, and the other one was for general question/answer forums, like this one. Is there any way someone could help me out?
what do you mean by roleplaying forum?

best regards

[Xandhoniox]

By roleplaying forum, I mean where my users create characters and then play as them, sort of making a story as they go along. They'll be following a general plot line, but they'll have freedoms of their own to post however they want. My site in particular is a fan-based site on a really good book, and I want them to be able to post as the characters of the book, following a forum setup that is set up kind of like this one, but with a bit more to it, like avatars, signatures, and stuff like that.

[BabyJack]

Hmm. You will need PHP to do this and if you're not familiar with it, then it's going to cost you.

[Xandhoniox]

I know a little bit about PHP. I have the software to make it, but I'm still not sure of what to do with it. I'm kind of new to this whole coding thing, outside of HTML and CSS. I've been doing HTML and CSS for a while (still don't know everything, though), but PHP is new to me, and I'm not quite sure of how to work it. All I really need to know is this, I guess:


how to make forums that are connected to the main forum through another page (the admin cp)
how to edit and moderate those forums through another control panel (the moderator cp)
how to create placeholders that can detect which user is online, and pull up their stats and such automatically when they post
how to enable posting into the database using forms and stuff
and how to add forum coding (like the stuff we're using on here)

But the thing is, I have used a hosted forum before, but there are a lot of features that I don't have access to that I would like to add to or remove from the forums, and I can't. So I want to make my own forum, where I know I have access to everything, and know I can change anything I want to change. That's all I need. But of course, that drags me into a whole new area I've never explored before, and this time, it's a lot harder to find out what I need to learn. Any bit of help that you could give me would be appreciated.