FreeForum

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This forum project is still a work in progress and is not ready for
production use. As such, there is no easy setup script yet. To run this
software, you will need a configuration file called
"localhost/freeforum.const" on your include path. This configuration
file just defines a few constants that FreeForum needs before it can
connect with the MySQL database. A list of the constants needed can be
found in the "freeforum.const.example" file included in this directory.
Once your configuration file is set up, you will need to set up a MySQL
database with a few tables. The following tables are required:

* users
* groups
* forums
* threads
* posts
* settings

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Notes for developers: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

User groups set up by the setup script should probably be as follows:

0: Root Administrators
1: Guests
2: Users

Then again, we might want to eliminate the first group from the
database and instead treat it as special hard-coded case. In theory,
this group should never be removed and never have any permissions added
or revoked. This level of administrator should be given full permission
to perform all actions that the software can perform. If this group is
kept in the database, it will probably just be so that the name of the
group is modifiable. The guest group on the other hand, should never be
deleted, but should definitely exist in the database to allow
administrators to change the permissions given to users that are not
logged in.

The guest user account will probably be hard-coded. No information
about the user is recorded, so there is no reason to keep any guest in
the database. That said, posts will need to be able to save a copy of
the guest's name as a part of the post's data. While the user will not
have information or an account, it would be nice if posts looked like
they were from "Example (guest)" instead of "Guest". Additionally, the
names used by guests must not be reserved against use by users, which
is one reason why guest data should not be stored in the users table.
Once a name is attached to a user's account though, it might be wise to
prevent guests from using that name without logging in.

Another option would of course be to not treat guests as a special case
at all. Instead, posts made by guests could be added to a guest account
shared by everyone that posts when not logged in.

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