A forum engine in the classic phpBB mold: categories, sections, topics and infinitely nested replies, written like Hedgehog in pure PHP and vanilla JavaScript. It was a college practice project, started about five months after the blog engine, and it shows what those months taught me.
What it does
The same self-installer idea, but smarter: it detects its own install path and rewrites its config so the forum works from any subdirectory. Real user accounts this time, with hashed passwords and a registration queue: new accounts wait until an admin approves them from a panel where the toggle flips live, without a page reload.
Replies nest to any depth and are drawn with thread lines. Messages get a BBCode-style formatting toolbar, up to four attachments, and a hand-written fullscreen image viewer with wheel zoom and drag panning. Every user picks their own theme (light, dark, or green-on-black console) plus an accent hue on a 0 to 360 slider that recolors the whole interface as you drag. Admins can export the user list to an actual Word document, because the coursework rubric demanded a report.
Honest notes
The internal name is xddBB. The installer’s submit button says “Start blogging”, copy-pasted from Hedgehog and never changed. A new message comes pre-filled with lorem ipsum. The admin endpoints trust the client and skip the session check, the “last message” column is permanently empty because the query hardcodes it to null, and the default forum logo is a sunset photo of two guys in front of an apartment block. The demo still runs.
