Howdy. I'm an older user from the wwwthreads days, I left right when the software got sold (I'm guessing to infopop, can't remember now). Back in the day I remember I had my own homepage php (or maybe I was using perl ... ) call the same w3t database my forums were using. I had a special news read-only forum set up so I could post a new news article and it updated my homepage.
I'm setting up my business and want to get a bit ambitious with my new site. I want to use the same MySQL database to house the messages from the forum(s), client contacts and information for use internally for my employees as well as have the same sort of dynamically-built homepage and sub-home pages I had "in the olden days". I thought starting with a good message board software like this one may be the best way to get things going and build off of it rather than try and use a separate database php software and separate message boards, etc.
My question is - is this software an appropriate tool to start building off of or has it become more difficult to do this sort of thing with the later revisions of this software? Am I better off having a separate mysql database for internal operations and keeping the message board separate?
Any thoughts or ideas you may have are welcome!
Thanks!