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SIMON RIGBY
28b Lady Somerset Road
London
NW5 1UP

PROFILE AND CAREER HISTORY
PORTFOLIO

Practical Photography Forum

The purpose of this site is primarily as a message board where Practical Photography readers can involve themselves in discussions about a variety of photography subjects or post questions for response by the panel of experts or other members. It also contains some background about the Practical Photography team and magazine.

The forum itself is written using Perl and the user information and content of the individual forums is stored in XML files. Due to constraints imposed by the domain hosting package, it was not possible to implement a database solution, which would have been preferable.

Users are required to register before using the forums. After registering and selecting a unique username, which is validated against the usernames already stored before acceptance, an email is sent to Practical Photography with the registration details, and another is sent to the user, welcoming them and providing them with a randomly generated alphanumeric password.

After logging in, the user can select the subject matter of interest, and either reply to any current threads or post a new thread for discussion. Unfortunately the project was put on hold indefinitely, due to budget constraints, before it could be launched.