The question is self explanatory. I want to know everything that I need to teach myself in order to make an exact clone of MacRumors in terms of forums and databases. I don't want to read about how long it will take or how difficult it might be. I just need someone to list exactly what I need to study. Thank you for your time.
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What Do I Need to Know in Order to Make a Website?
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So are you looking to develop a BB/forum application, or just want software to use/run a BB system? If it’s the latter, there’s a ton of free and reasonably cheap options (from install yourself to simple cloud options that provide hosting/software).
If you’re looking to duplicate the functionality, you can do that with any language/framework, i.e., I could replicate this system using PHP/MySQL, or Rails, or Python/DJango, or Node, with MySQL, or Postgres, etc.
If you’re looking to duplicate the functionality, you can do that with any language/framework, i.e., I could replicate this system using PHP/MySQL, or Rails, or Python/DJango, or Node, with MySQL, or Postgres, etc.
I want to learn this in order to eventually make a freelancing business for more personal income. I know it's not easy; nothing in life is. I just want to dive in and learn every last detail that I can. I figure if I can replicate something like MacRumors in terms of functionality I can tackle anything.
Ahh, OK. Having a target product/result isnt a bad way to proceed.
As pointed out, there are a number of different skill sets to learn: the markup/layout/styling of the page, client side scripting, server side code, database design.
If you do want to learn PHP and MySQL, and youre on a Mac, an easy way to get started it with MAMP:
http://www.mamp.info/en/
That installs Mac (M) versions of Apache (A) a web server, MySQL (M), and PHP (P) extensions for the web server. It also installs a little web based front to manage the server and links to other resources to download like phpMyAdmin for the web and database (MySQL has a free, full management app too called MySQL Workbench).
Then you can just add your choice of a decent text editor and youre ready to go, Sublime Text, BBEdit (or the free Text Wrangler).
If you havent done any HTML/CSS work, you can start learning that without any server, just a text editor and youre ready. Same goes for client side Javascript, that runs in the browser, no server needed.
Good luck!
All you need to know is me. For $10,000 I'll make you a website that looks absolutely identical, and it will be called RumorsMac, which I already own all the international copyrights to but can sell to you for another $1,000. 
Serious now... In addition to knowing the programming and markup languages involved, knowing procedures and how everything works together is equally important. Knowing how to make something responsive, how to make it easier to index, all that jazz, is important as well because it dictates the quality of experience your users will have; if it's glitchy or hard to use, you'll have a pretty high bounce rate.
However, while knowing coding is almost vitally important, basically you can get a full featured forum set up using free or inexpensive forum software and free templates. Basically, if you can upload a file using FTP you can start your own forum.
Serious now... In addition to knowing the programming and markup languages involved, knowing procedures and how everything works together is equally important. Knowing how to make something responsive, how to make it easier to index, all that jazz, is important as well because it dictates the quality of experience your users will have; if it's glitchy or hard to use, you'll have a pretty high bounce rate.
However, while knowing coding is almost vitally important, basically you can get a full featured forum set up using free or inexpensive forum software and free templates. Basically, if you can upload a file using FTP you can start your own forum.
If you want to learn and be extremely productive at the same time, I'd definitely recommend to learn the Ruby language and the Ruby on Rails framework to build web applications, over PHP etc. As database system PostgreSQL or MySQL. It would be useful to learn also Twitter Bootstrap o similar CSS frameworks (actually Bootstrap is more than just a CSS framework) to help quickly design responsive apps; then Javascript and optionally CoffeScript. With these tools you don't need anything particular to run a development environment; for the staging/production environment you can start first with something like the free tier of Heroku so you can focus on learning the web development part first (Heroku takes care of the hosting part so you don't have to worry about it; it also takes care of the scalability if you decide to go with it also for the production environment).
Once you are OK with the development, you can avoid the expensive Heroku and learn to host everything yourself with, for example, virtual servers hosted by Linode or similar; but there is a lot to learn there as well if you want to host your apps efficiently and securely.
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Once you are OK with the development, you can avoid the expensive Heroku and learn to host everything yourself with, for example, virtual servers hosted by Linode or similar; but there is a lot to learn there as well if you want to host your apps efficiently and securely.
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Yeah, it’s probably way beyond the scope of the question, but up above I did mention that the tech used on this site isn’t the only option to building something _like_ this site, in fact, I specifically mentioned Rails
It’s a great framework for reinforcing good practices like MVC, Testing, where PHP OOTB is really easy to code poorly - though if you drop on CakePHP, Yii, CodeIgniter you do get a much improved code framework.I’ve got a couple of things in production using Rails, and if someone was developing what I’d call a “standard” web app, it’s great option. The templating engine is well done (others are easily plugged in), there’s tons of 3rd party libraries for things like Auth, S3 storage, easily dropped in DSLs for things like JSON. I also like Ruby quite a bit.
Anymore, there are a ton of choices when it come to languages and frameworks, Go, Scala, alternate Ruby frameworks, Python and its option for webdev. It gets even more vast when you start looking into client based frameworks (Angular, Ember), pre-processors for CSS like SASS, template engines like HAML (side note: do not like Coffeescript, just don’t think there’s a need for simplification/abstraction there), Jade, and like you mentioned, Bootstraps for core markup.
I actually opted not to use Rails for a new project, I’m using Node.js/Express, plus Angular/Yo - fast RESTful backend that will be consumed by a rich client UI, going noSQL for storage/state with MongoDB. Cool stuff.
I’ve got to say, I love the PaaS options that are available now like Heroku, AppEngine, AppFog, Azure.
It’s funny, just keeping your head around the available tech and tools is a full time job. I’ve been in the dev sector for over 25 years, and I’m still learning and amazed at the current options.
VIM > all
Oh, no, you did not just start that.
emacs > vim > all
/thread
I won't touch this with a 10-meter cattle prod.
I also like Ruby quite a bit.
I love it! For me programming in Ruby is an enjoyable experience, compared to other languages.
Why node instead of Rails for this new project? Any particular reason?
Me too, but they get very expensive very quickly unfortunately
Agreed!