Needing help with starting up my first website/forum/blog combo

[NiKSY]

Exactly


My knowledge is very limited on this topics... Well, OK, blog is easy to make with all those blog hosting sites, I will manage to make the site itself with couple of apps that I found and graphics wont be a problem, forum...Forum is where my knowledge is the smallest...


A collective problem of mine for all these is -> getting it on line. Don't know how to make a forum work (all those PHP, MySQL database stuff is unknown to me...never done it) and well..I have no hosting...


Quickly jumping to the questions...:
-Would you recommend some other forum than SMF? I really like how MotoHell works, so thought I could use it...
-Know some reliable free hosting? (Will be a small site (<100mb for sure) and a forum with less than 100 users (also for sure)) I cant afford hosting/domain so I would be happy with mysitename.freehostingservice.net, for start at least

-Know some stuff to read? That maybe helped you get quickly over this kind of things?


I appreciate all your help!

Cheers!


*EDIT* Why not say the idea anyway... I wanna make a complete portal for my class mates... Blog with news like when will the test be what will be the questions and stuff (lol) and writing it like a class diary, some picture galleries, page for every one of us, forum for some chit-chat... I think its a nice idea for starting and learning all that stuff and it could be fun

[keaglez]

For free hosting, try byethost or 000webhost (the last one is working good on me, but some user has reported that the database deleted sometime), but if you can spend a little amount of money, you should try to get paid hosting that usually have more reliable service... There is a lot of cheap hosting available now..

For forum, maybe you can look for phpbb... well, i don't really know this kind of stuff actually...

But well, if you want to combine blog and forum, maybe you should see bbpress (bbpress.org)...

[Exploited]

See if you go to Wordpress blog with a fancy theme, probably you will not need a forum... it is very powerful for small communities - users can register and post articles (just like topics) and then other users comment (just like in the forum)... Probably there are plugins like private messaging and etc... Empty forum with small amount of users is uncool. A blog-like forum with many authors is always awesome. Also it prevents the non-experienced users to post crap topics.

[NiKSY]

See if you go to Wordpress blog with a fancy theme, probably you will not need a forum... it is very powerful for small communities - users can register and post articles (just like topics) and then other users comment (just like in the forum)... Probably there are plugins like private messaging and etc... Empty forum with small amount of users is uncool. A blog-like forum with many authors is always awesome. Also it prevents the non-experienced users to post crap topics.

I'll check into it Thanks!!