Greetings.

What I am attempting to do is create a small community web site for people to sell their used books. The plan that I have is they will be able to post their books to my site, where other views can browse the titles that others have posted. No transaction occur on the site, except possibly a small fee to post their books. Rather than add every entry myself, is there any way to streamline the process? Any suggestions as to how to make each entry accessible to those that are browsing the book listings? I have limited html knowledge, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Is this really a _specific_ community? I mean, suppose you are the guild of Norwegian sausage conoisseurs, then just a forum (like this) might do. If you just hope people will come to buy and sell books in general, well, um, you might start by looking at people like http://abe.com (who have 13,500 booksellers selling 100 million books, so you might have a lot of catching up to do)...

One of these CGI classified-ad programs or one of these PHP classified-ad programs may meet your needs.

Thanks for the advice. The site is aimed at a very specific category. I am a student on a small college campus, and every semester when students sell their books they get posted on various bulletin boards across campus. They are a real pain to try and buy books from. I thought it would be convenient to collect the process into a website. Although I am beginning to realize the depth to such a project. I am hoping to categorize the books according to their subject area (humanities, social sciences, medical, etc). So far I just main a few basic pages to give it a "frame". I'm not sure how ad oriented I thought the project would be, rather than a simple "listing" of books. For example, the plan I had was for each person to list their contact information (phone#) along with their book and price. Kinda like a bulletin board, but online. Does my idea sound feasible?

Yes, it sounds exactly like a bulletin board*, which is what a "forum" used to be called.

( * I'm British, so to me "Bulletin board" only refers to software, and in fact it was some time after I had been using them that I realised that "bulletin board" is just the American for "noticeboard", which is what we call the things you stick bits of paper on.)

So all you need to do is install forum software (phpbbs, or similar - I expect all of them share the irritating and generally stupid "features" like this one here); have one forum for each department. It's probably much better not to require logins to view the board, but it will be easy to set things up so people don't necessarily have to publish their email address. You need to spend a bit of time thinking about the best way to arrange this...

Anyway, you're not trying to reinvent ABE, so good luck!

Thanks again for the great advice. Do you know of any good "tutorials" that woull allow me to better understand the workings of bulletin board application you mentioned? Where do you think I would be able to host the site? This would be the first I've created that would need to utilize a database.

The manual that comes with the board you choose should be enough. Any host that offers the languages you need. For example for phpBB mentioned above that would be PHP and a MySQL database.