Trading Forum

[MasterZuFu]

This is very nice! Very close to what I've been looking for! Thanks to LeeFish for pointing me to XThreads!

I'm not so much looking for a "trading" section as I am for a "Training Auction" section. My website, http://www.ethical-hackers.org, is a training site meant to offer free training to anyone and everyone. Unlike the majority of hacking sites you see, Ethical Hackers has no black-hat material, and everything in the training sections is meant to be of professional grade (meaning the material itself has to be up to par with leading training materials available for purchase elsewhere on the internet). The point is, free. That's the problem I'm finding. Everyone wants to be trained for free, but no one wants to train for free. I need trainers, people to write the material, and that costs money, money I don't have.

So, without training, the site becomes useless and falls to the wayside. So, I kind of need this desperately for my site to continue. LeeFish showed me XThreads and pointed me to this plugin, which is amazingly close to what I'm looking for.

Basically what I'm wanting is something like this:

Option 1: User posts thread requesting training on a specific topic (let's say it's Ethical Hacking). They put down a base price they're willing to pay.
               1A. Other users have the option to add to that payment to meet the goal.
               1B. An expert in the field comes along and says, "I know that subject very well, and I'll accept that price."
The expert then writes the training, submits it to the site and, after reviewed by our team, the training is posted on the site freely available to the rest of the forum and anyone else who comes along and the money is transferred to the expert and everyone is happy.

Option 2: An Expert comes across the site and says, "Well, I'm an expert in this field and, even though there's not a request, I'll put an offer up." and the expert places and offer that he'll write the materials for this topic for $x.xx. Members can contribute to the offer and give payments until the amount is reached, email sent to the expert and the expert writes the material, once reviewed is posted for everyone on the site, and the expert is paid.

This is about the only method I can think of to get this site off the ground, and I'm thinking this plugin will be the best thing I've got to doing it, but it seems like it's going to need a lot of edits and changes. Should I go ahead and run through this tutorial and get this version setup and then work with someone to changing it to my needs? or will this be something that has to be completely redone for my specific needs from the start?

-ZuFu


EDIT: I'm going to go ahead and run through this tutorial and get it all done, then perhaps I can get the auction part more specified later. I do kind of need this for another part of my site anyways.