Hercco

You need to add global $a; Inside the function scope. If you have several values you need inside the off-file functions it's handy to make an array so that you don't have to "global XX" everything.

To point you to right direction we need to know how much earlier programming experience you guys have?If you have programmed just about anything with C or other procedural language you should be able to learn PHP quite easily just with php.net documentation. However if you lack programming experience completely, first you really need to learn how "things are done". For example expressions, control stucktures, functions and other such. PHP is easy language if you know programming, if not its just as hard as anything.

Wordpress is really great. It strated out as a bit of dodgy system but with the latest versions it is about as good as a blog system can get. The basic systems does what the basic system should: the blog functionality and not much more. But then there's very useer friendly modfications system which you can use to make your blog to do stuff you want. Only complaint I have is that, as far as I know, there is currently no way of integrating Wordpress with a forum software. It'd be really handy if people who post at my forums could comment my bloggings with the same logins.

This is really good idea. I have several pages with "screen.css" but then never bothered to a a printable version. Generally speaking using different style sheet for different medias (in addition to paper and desktop screen, for example PDAs) is something that I like as coding style.

I've decided not to install any mods to my SMF. If I'll need any features I'll just wait for the to come to the official release.

Word. Having separate CSS stylesheet and writing XHTML is kind of a step towards semantic web from your behalf. "Getting used to the idea". I personalyl like to have multiple separate CSS files. For example, I have a file called menu.css which I include (or to be accurate, link) in every page I have a side menu on my site. It is so easy to use the same classes and have identically looking menus on all my pages. And when I want to change colours or fonts or what ever its one file edit. I usually also have a "generic" css fle in which I have the setting that usually every page has. Such as links (I like to have similar links in every page) and bottom copyright div class.

The eye of the beholder... I can't really say that I have much experice from differencet C/C++ compilers. Because I've mainly done C for my university stuff I've always had to use gcc and it has kind of stuck. Anyways if not anything else, gcc is a safe choice.

Or at least tell its name.... Could it be that Cookiemonster is distrubuting warez? Bod Cookiemonster!!

It looks like your host is piece of crap... The page didn't even open for me. And yeah those errors indicate that the server is heavily overloaded.

These are not just databases, but entire hosting services. Anywyas they're all free and provide mySQL so... http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Pick your favourite. *Hint* *hint* ASTA *Hint* *hint*

Just did my upgrade. Apart from few chmoddings everything went as smoothly as possible. Quita a big difference from what it was with phpBB. With my heavily modded phpBB it took at least a day to get new version up and running. :lol:I love SMF.

Six months or so ago the broadband connection prices here in finland dropped quite dramatically. Partially because of the increase in competition but probably also because of a government warning to the operators who kepts way too big profit margins compared to other european countries.My own connection... well I have 1Mb/512kb ADSL with no transmission limits (we don't have them here) and I use it quite heavily, ie. download stuff from p2p networks. It costs me 30EUR/month which I think is reasonable.

Yeah. Wget is blocked at panda. I had a cron job running a wget to execute a certain php script daily (didn't come to me at the time that I could've just used 'php script.php') but it stopped working month or so ago. So its not your script or php, its the apache settings.

Problem with this is that someone could abuse it by requestion the page with some html code the GET values. For example index.php?page=%3Cimg%20src=%22 http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ which would add a <img tag your page with a picture you'd probably not want there. So if you do this, at least strip html tags before echoing the GET data. strip_tags() will do the job.

Sorry... I just read your post in my thread and noticed that recurring events are in fact in SMF 1.1. I'll try to come up with some other questions.

My question: In future, will there be an option of posting recurring events in the calendar?

Invision is better, more modern in my opinion. But then again its not OS and free like phpBB. If I'd have to pick one I'd go for phpBB because of the open sourceness. But I'm glad I don't have to since there's SMF.

PHP is a interpreted programming language which are often referred as scripting languages. HTML is a markup language and has nothing to do with programming. And for mySQL, proper term would probably be database management system which is several programs and methods for storaging the data (to files, that is). m^e's post was good but I'd like to point out that PHP can be used to other things than outputting HTML. That is just the most common use for it and what the first versions were originally designed just for. Originalyl the abreviation was Personal Homepage but laters changed to Hypertext Preprocessor. Both indicate the most common use and the optimation of the language. To mention few things that can be done with PHP would be command line scripts (like shell scripts) and binary file processing (images often, also binary document types such as pdf). Cookiemonster asked if mySQL was the best DBMS ever... Well it probably isn't. That is if you take account all the features that DBMS can have. MySQL is very fast and thus very suitable for relatively simple use. But the speed comes from the fact that it doesn't have nearly as much features and its commercial competitors. But considering how databases are typically used on webpages, the extra features that the heavier systems posses are probably 99% of the time useless and the speed in fact is far more important. So I'd dare to say that for website use 8such as discussion forums) mySQL is the best DBMS.

I must have the most boring LAN here. One machine running Win2K and one running Mandrake Linux. First one is Athlon 2600+ with 1Gb RAM other one is Pentium III 550 MHz with 184MB ram which handles the Linux surprisingly well.

We all SMF users know that it's a great system... but it's not perfect.So do you have anything that you wish would be fixed, altered, enabled or ammended? I've got couple.First the calendar. While it is a great addition to the system and it is fantastic that it's part of the basic package (ie. not a modification) it still needs some more features. Mainly, recurring events. It is quite common that groups or clubs or whatever hold weekly or monthly events, however the system does not allow you to post them with one action. So recurring events to the calender so that you could post events that happen weekly/monthly/annually or better yet with the option of posting bi-weekly (ect...) events. I believe that would be a big step on making SMF a centre of a groups or clubs site, if its not that already.Other thing... The smiley sets. This is not a major problem but it should also be quite a easy to fix. Currently, you cannot easily set which simleys from a set appears at the posting page directly. Currently you'd need to do this smiley by smiley which is quite time consuming task. So easy mass editing for smileys.

Upgraded mine the other day. This was actually my first SMF upgrade (started using 1.0.3) and I was more than happy to noticve how easily it was done.

Never mind. I found the solution on my own. Actually all groups are hidden, just when you add member to the group go and change the primary group (apparently the forum automatically assigns new, non-post count based groups as primary groups) to something else from each users profile. Where I screwed up was thinking like it was phpBB... Well it isn't. The membergroup system is SMF works fine in my forums since I don't have large groups that need to be 'hidden'. But is one had say 100 members hidden groups changing the primary group manually doesn't sound very tempting I smell need for a script or a plugin

To be fair, all the major bulletin board systems are really easy to install. If you are hosted here at asta, you can use Fantastico to install SMF, Invision or phpBB automatically, just filling out few form fields! It's actually easier to do than to register a one from invisionfree or other such service. What I suggest is that you look into the different systems, by visiting their official websites http://www.simplemachines.org/, https://invisionpower.com/features/apps and https://www.phpbb.com/ and check which has the features that suit your purpose the best. Also paying attention to what systems the forums that you visit use gives a pretty good idea of what each system can and can not do. And then, you could just go and install all of them, try them out, use the admin panels and changing the look to your liking... Then just pick the one which you like the most.

You can read RSS feeds with cell phones. Well, with smart phones that have suitable software.

Hey fellow SMF'ers. I was wondering, can you do hidden groups in SMF? What I mean by hidden group is a similar to what phpBB has, ie. people who do not belong to the group do not know who are in the group. With SMF, when I create a group is always adds the groups name under the user's name.I ask because I'd like to create forums that only certain people have access and that no one else should know anything about.