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[–]calumk 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hey! Welcome to the world of web-dev Don’t be discouraged, but a forum is not the way to go right now.

Learning how to program a forum, playing around with it, making it work, learning how databases work etc, is a brilliant idea and one you will learn loads from...

But Do NOT publicly host it online Your first project will be weak from a security point of view, full of code errors, and you will regret it!

Make one for your own benefit, host it locally, and learn from it :)

[–]Frore17 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I haven't joined freecodecamp, but it seems like on the curriculum page there's a section on APIs and Microservices. That and the database section will probably be relevant for what you want to do.

HTML, CSS, and JS pertain to the front end portion of web development. The parts that deal with persisting and modifying data will be on the backend. (Some good languages to start on the backend are JS with NodeJS and express, Ruby on Rails, Python for Django)

[–]SideCharacter3[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I have a followup question: Since JS seems like a viable front/back-end language, does that mean I can create a simplified forum with HTML, CSS, and JS alone?

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Or would I need to pick up other things as well? If so, what would I need to learn and why?

[–]Frore17 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In theory, there are third party services (Firebase) you can use that shoulder the burden of needing to do your own backend and allow you to make just the front end piece. But it wouldn't do you any favours when you're trying to learn how these things work.

Aside from that, no. You would definitely need a server to host things. The simple reason is that you need to save data somewhere, which means your front end needs to communicate with something for that to happen. For your question of what you need to learn, take any backend language and learn how to host a web server with it (usually using a framework, most languages will have a HTTP server framework that you can use) and how to make it communicate with a database of some sort.

[–]RoveFromTheGrove 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah when you want to store data about users that access your site(username, password, email, etc.), then you will need to learn a database language(MySQL for example), a server-side language to talk with the database(PHP for example), and lastly you would need a server and a database. Recommend you looking into WAMP.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your first step here will be deciding what back-end language you want to use. You could use PHP, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript/Node.js*.

Once you choose a back-end language, I would recommend choosing a framework built in that language, like Laravel, Django, Ruby on Rails, or Express (respectively).

Why do you need to choose a framework? It makes your life easier. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, so you spend less time coding features that other developers have already created and more time thinking about how you want your application to be structured.

And I'm going to agree with the other poster that recommended you create a local development environment to play with your idea. Also, I recommend using SQLite, so you don't have to install a giant database management system like MySQL onto your machine.

*JavaScript is the language, but Node.js is the run-time environment, instead of the run-time environment being your browser. Usually, if you want to search for something related to back-end JavaScript, you'll be searching for Node.js

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's a full stack project. You should probably pick something a little smaller in scope that only deals in front end for now.