Lighttpd, PHP, SQLITE, and a Forum

So, here's the thing. I have an old Pentium(1), 200 MHz with 64MB of ram. Resuming, a top machine. I'm a little nuts so I figured that I wanted to make something of that, so I've transformed it in to a home server. I've put gentoo(with 586 CHOST with pentium-classic optimizations, I had to compile everything from scratch), lighttpd, sqlite, and PHP.

Since I have several open source projects hosted in sourcefourge and others, I decided to host the web pages of my progects so that I can at least win the ads revenue. Since other are wining my ads money.

Anyway, since It's a damn old machine with little ram, I've decided NOT to use content management software like joomla or phpnuke, since It's to heavy for such low specs. So I've build everything from scratch from the guestbook to the comments code.

Well the thing is. I need a forum to give future support to my apps, but I don't have the patience to build one from scratch.

So my question is (and please don't send me to google, since I do put effort on my research), Do you guys know any good light(minimalistic) PHP forum that works well with lighttpd and sqlite2 or sqlite3.

You can have a look on how the page already looks like in http://alvaromorais.homelinux.org

Thanks for the patience.

I've had good luck with smf for a lightweight forum, however for sqlite support you'd need to use the 2.0 release candidate.

http://www.simplemachines.org/

Thanks. I will try SMF 2. But I suspect that's not the ideal solution since I need a more minimalist forum. With no level accounts. Just a simple. Administrator, guest, registered level.

I provide support at SMF however regardless of the solution you go with, you'd be far better using a proper database (even on such an old machine)

Also going slightly offtopic, however I believe sourceforge require adsense to be setup in a certain way so that they still get a percentage even if you're not directly hosted with them (I suppose it is fair given that it does cost money for them to host your stuff)

here is a fairly good list of php forum software comparisons. Look for a minimalistic set of your required features and give it a roll. I've only personally used phpbb, smf, invision, ubb, and vbulletin as most of the forums I've been running needed fairly significant feature sets. The ones that I didn't need serious feature sets for I've run SMF on even though it has a good feature set it's pretty light weight compared to some of the above.

Taking a quick look at the above chart looks like sqlite is going to limit you to FluxBB, FUDforum, MyBB, NextBBS, phpBB3, PunBB, and SMF2.

Edit: If you're looking for *truly* simple then maybe some code reuse from this tutorial is more your speed, change it over to sqlite and roll it right into the rest of the custom code on your site. Since most of the logic is there already it would be fast to integrate it into your site.

Originally Posted by huwnet I provide support at SMF however regardless of the solution you go with, you'd be far better using a proper database (even on such an old machine)

Hi. I was hoping to avoid MySQL. I'm relearning the word light again, since I've deployed this server in this old machine. I've tried Debian before as a server but it was too heavy, since it is compiled with SELinux. Even after disabling SELinux it was heavy. But I guess I could enable MySQL with the minimal gentoo profile, since it has a small memory footprint.

Originally Posted by huwnet Also going slightly offtopic, however I believe sourceforge require adsense to be setup in a certain way so that they still get a percentage even if you're not directly hosted with them (I suppose it is fair given that it does cost money for them to host your stuff)

I do not want to take sourceforge revenue since I think they deserve it. If I wanted to remove their revenue I could simple host my svn repositories and abandon sourceforge for hosting. The thing is. When you post an open-source program in sourceforge in the fallowing week you will see hundreds of software sites around the world(even in japan) linking to your project so they can earn ads revenue. That's their business model, and I don't have anything against it. If I had, I would,'t make my projects GPL.
I currently don't have any business model, since I make programs for fun. But if so many are making money indirectly with my work why can't I have a piece of the pie too.

Edit: If you're looking for *truly* simple then maybe some code reuse from this tutorial is more your speed, change it over to sqlite and roll it right into the rest of the custom code on your site. Since most of the logic is there already it would be fast to integrate it into your site.

Thanks. I alredy made the sessions class(with sqlite support) and the guest-book(it's not available yet), so most of the work is done. If I decide to go trough and make the forum myself I will probably reuse some code.

Heres one:
TABLE thread
title,
fk_originalAuthor,
creationDate
fk_state

TABLE post
content,
fk_user,
fk_thread,
date,
creationDate

TABLE user
name,
email,
inscriptionDate

TABLE state
description = SEQ(open,close,hidden,removed)

Writing a forum using those table should fit in 450 SLOC with basic HTML+CSS and run fine on SQLITE