Personal Message Script

[wizard]

Does anybody know if there is a script or program that I can download that allows people to register a username and pasword on my site then send personal messages to each other etc? Thanks in advance.

[stevie21]

phpBB is free forum software which does what you need (and so much more that it's possibly a bit of overkill).

Where are the messages stored - on your server? Emailed?
This doesn't sound too difficult, unless you want to make it hack and idiot proof you should be able to write this yourself without a fantastic amount of expertise.

[wizard]

They could be stored on the server or emailed, whichever would be easiest. I was thinking about using phpBB but I didn't want to use forum software because I wanted something that could be intergrated into my site a lot more and just have the function of sending Private Messages.

[stevie21]

If you've programmed anything on your site that involves a database then you should be able to save these messages to a new table in the database, mark them as read/unread and notify users of new messages.
Do you want the messages to be the equivalent of a "private message"/email or real time chat? The latter would be more tricky I think.

Does your site use any language beyond html already? asp or php for example?

[wizard]

Yeah it would be a Private Message/Email type of thing. My site has the capabilites of running PHP and MySQL yeah. No its not using anything beond HTML at the mo, its all static at the moment.

[stevie21]

I could knock this together in asp as I have more experience of that but I might have a look at how easy it is in php & mySQL which I've almost never used. All I've ever done in php is display someone's IP address!

If you can find an online tutorial for saving *anything* to a mySQL database with php then you'll be 80% of the way there once that works.

If you want me to have a nosey about later:
http://www.stevie21.f2s.com/AB/stevie.jpg