what does it take to become a 'webmaster'

[CB]

My friend who died in the crash was the webmaster from our martial arts forum.
It is now under supervision of our sister club in our neighbors' country.
He'll be in charge until someone from our club takes over.

So what skills do you need to run a site/forum?
http://fiveelements.forumup.be/
(technical skills I mean)
Thanks
CB

[bigred68]

  Me to! I'd like to know as well! 

[mopar_nut_440_6]

It is like anything else. Anybody can learn anything if you put your mind to it. Granted some are better than others at picking things up, especially in the IT world.

To maintain a decent website requires a pretty solid understanding of HTML, CSS, and PHP for starters. Programming experience would be helpful but can be learned. Expect to put in 100's of hours to get up top speed and even longer trying to figure out what others have done. Programming is somewhat of an art and can be done many ways to arrive at the same solution, some good some bad.

I quickly took a look at that site and it almost looks like a template. Quite often these are easier to maintain as they are done through a GUI (graphical user interface) but hard to say as it was not in English! I would suggest that you ask to take a look at what is there and see if it looks like something you would be interested in. I built a website last year and spent probably 300-400 hours learning the languages.

Cheers,

[Troy]

If it's just the forum it's pretty easy actually. That site is running PHPBB software so if there aren't a ton of modifications you can control everything from the Admin area. Assuming it's on a shared server you won't need to worry too much about the hardware, operating system, or installed software either. Other than that - it's time consuming. And you get lots of hate mail.

Troy

[Dans 68]

...And you get lots of hate mail.

Troy

Hah! I cannot believe it is deserved in your case. Would probably make good reading....

CB, you are a good man even to think about taking over for your friend. 

Dan

[CB]

Thanks Dan, I wish he was still around 

Let me talk to my teacher and the webmaster to see if I can put my free time in it.

Thanks
CB

[dodgecharger-fan]

If it's just the forum it's pretty easy actually. That site is running PHPBB software so if there aren't a ton of modifications you can control everything from the Admin area. Assuming it's on a shared server you won't need to worry too much about the hardware, operating system, or installed software either. Other than that - it's time consuming. And you get lots of hate mail.

Troy

Ditto.

You can learn a lot about phpbb here: http://www.phpbb.com/ There's documentation in the support section and they have a forum where you can ask questions.

For me, I found that being forced to learn something is the best way. Not that I was forced into taking care of moparnuts.com - I offered to help. Once I got in to it a saw what needed to be done (and what I didn't know how to do), I was able to narrow my focus on what I needed to know to get things done.
I went from not being able to spell SQL to running queries inside a month... because if I didn't figure it out, I wouldn't be able to transfer everything from one forum software to another.