I'm going to be developing a site that will allow various groups to sign up, and each one to have it's own forum section of the site, completely independent of any other forum. There will also be other various group-specific items (event calendar and such).
In regards to that, I have two question:
1) Should I try to roll my own solution, given that I'm going to have to have multiple forums in one site?
a) If so, should I actually try to roll this out via one table in a DB, dynamically created tables, should I try to do a subsite (ie group1.mysite.com, group2.mysite.com) and have each one of those sites have its own rails app?
2) If I don't need to roll my own, can someone point me at software that either can already do this, or that I should use as a starting point (basic forum software) and modify it to be able to have multiple forums?
2) If I don't need to roll my own, can someone point me at software that either can already do this, or that I should use as a starting point (basic forum software) and modify it to be able to have multiple forums?
Both this and Beast look interesting... starting out, I will use one of these (probably RForum because I've used it a lot via ruby-forum.com), but I'll probably eventually end up patching one of them (locally) to allow for "sub-forums", so you can have something like:
Group1's Forum
list of forums
Group2's Forum
etc. You may even be able to do that already, I don't know... I'll have to look in to it. I'm guessing, if you can't, it's as easy as adding another field to the table, referencing the group, so that when giving a list of forums, you can do conditions => [ "group=?", user[:group] ].
Which will get far more confusing if a user can have more than one group.