that's what i said... used for archiving, not pure editing/search.

what i would suggest is to focus on one part of the possibilities... some here are suggesting it can become a great archive system, for closed topics and archive system, and i think it can be the best of both worlds... because actually it's one of the things that is missing most here...

also, would be cool to merge with a semi-RSS feed, like on most blogs ... once we control this technique, personal blogs for our members will be easy to deal with, as there is no need to use the db for blogs...

anyway, back to work/test!

UBB classic used CGI to serve up dynamic information based on a flat-file system. It's the CGI/ PERL-based code that is the drain on the server.

However, what we are talking here is static HTML files, not CGI/ PHP based - that is a world of difference to UBB. :) We are talking about loading up static HTML files.

Great for threads to be read by guests who can't post anyway.

Mind you, I'm sure forum programmers would have thought of this, and if it was this simple to implement, it would have been done already. :) I'm sure there would be some overhead, which will probably come from the frequent updating of these static HTML files, which would probably override any if not all of the savings in server resources.

I could see issues with the dynamic content for posts, if there was a constant writing to the file system it would be almost as bad as using mysql if not worse

Interesting.

Is it possible to use more than one SQL database from another server within same network? We have a large Of Topic forum and it would be nice if the topics and posts of that one were served from the other database/server we have.

Nice thread, I'm a bit of a caching geek so let me point you to a few things:

Firstly... take a look at the cache cannon hack I was making for VB 2.x, it was abandoned as I was making it for a very specific person who was on a safe_mode protected box and it wouldn't work with safe_mode... however it did work fine on a normal box.

Anyhow, link for that:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=36000

That created 100% flat filed and browsable forums, threads and posts.

For searchability you would have to consider something that indexed the threads seperately (such as a site indexing tool) or simply embed a Google search box ;)

Secondly, if you want to improve caching for existing items but leave them in the database, consider using one of the PEAR cache libraries:
http://pear.php.net/packages.php?cat...atname=Caching

Thirdly... and possibly the most interesting... dump your posts, threads and forums data to XML files, embed at the top of these the path of an applicable XSLT file to render them, and offer an XPATH way to search, sort and browse them.

That is technically possible and feasible, though it will depend on your skills with XML, XSLT and XPATH as to whether you can make that work. I tell you one thing though... it would be a hell of a thing to see and would allow you to change the presentation of it over time in a way that static HTML would not.

The XSLT transformation gets shifted onto the browser btw... server side transformation would be intensive to say the least.

Helpful starters there:
A SQL 2 XML package:
http://pear.php.net/package/XML_sql2xml

XML Transformer package:
http://pear.php.net/package/XML_Transformer

XML XPath Queries package:
http://pear.php.net/package/XML_XPath