Creating Website from Scratch

I have a homework where I need to create a website of an organization using PHP and have databases.

How do I include links that updates on its own? For example, the latest discussions here in Novelupdates where the latest 2 threads are shown?

I'm creating a forum website for the organization btw and I thought that novelupdates forum is really cool and would like to incorporate some features but dont know how.

Do you have any links for tutorials or other recommendations? I will really appreciate it. Thanks

 

do you need to write one, or do you need to just make any web site with ready tools?

 

You have my best wishes. Good luck.

 

Our professor allowed us to use tools

 

if you want to make a forum, one of the easiest ways would be phpbb, mybb or something similar...
there is also wordpress and such..

Are you going to publish it, or it will be hosted only on your computer for the class purpose?

 

Only for the computer class.

 

in that case, you will need to install a database such as MySQL as well. It might be a good idea to also install PHPMyAdmin.
you will also need a web server, so perhaps an apache.
Everything is fairly straightforward to install.

an alternative would be to find a free hosting that provides this stuff for you

 

I already installed those and can use it to view php files.

Is this free? Because i'm poor af

 

good, then you are set

yep, all of these are free. just download phpBB and try it out.
wordpress is as far as I know online only.. they didn't release their engine for download. The others you can download with no problem

 

Thanks a lot

 

@eryafii use BBPress or phpbb

 

NUF uses XenForo which isn't free, license alone cost $160. You can check its price here: https://xenforo.com/purchase/

If it's a neat and free forum you're looking I'd recommend you to use the same forum engine as Qi Webnovel is using, Flarum, which is surprisingly free and open source. Another option for modern open source forum is Discourse, but that's written on Ruby instead of PHP if my memory is correct.

 

Can't you just use RSS? You know that web feed feature that most blogging sites have that informs you whenever something new is posted. It's one of the ways Novelupdates retrieve links.

Or you can use a time-specific content scraper which opens the URL of the website already listed in its database and scrapes any new post from that URL every 5 minutes (for example). Ai-chan isn't sure if there is a tool for this, you'd probably have to code it yourself.

EDIT: Oh wait, this thread was from a month ago. Guys! He probably already submitted the project to his professor!