vujsa

Well, I think that I have managed to address all of the issues brought up here except for the site header image. It was kind of difficult to get everything right but I found a way to trick IE into displaying everything correctly. I may eventually write a CSS specifically for each browser and let PHP decide which CSS file to use based on the users browser. Some of the issues were kind of simple like the off centered appearence of the right column headers. The alignment was "left" instead of "center". The individual modules each reside in a <div> tag so the content isn't centered inside the module, but the modules are centered inside of the column. The left side required a whole set of new CSS rules to allow for the padding of some items and no padding for the menu items. Simply adding some padding to the entire column would have really casued a bunch of problems with the spacing for the entire website. All of the columns would have had to have been resized along with ALL of the graphics work for each item. Would pretty much meant that the entire website template would have needed to be redesigned. I'm planning to add a few more functions and tutorials this week or next. Maybe after I get a little more content added to the site I'll start to redesign the website header image. I need to tie in an advertising banner and other promotional graphics work when I do the header. I really need a logo! I might ask around at Xisto for some inspiration. Thats how I came up with the header at VW One! Of course I found that inspriation is about all you'll get from Xisto since no one bothered to post any real suggestion but were more than happy to narrow the field of images I posted. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas for a logo, let me know. Well, thanks for reviewing my website. vujsa

Wow, I made it into the list of people called by name. Well, good luck in your many endeveurs. May life treat you well and prosperity shine upon you frequently. We'll continue to miss having you around here. Feel free to stop by from time to time and let us know how you are doing. vujsa P.S. We'll be needed that fish back now.

Wow, that's a sharp template for a web design forum. If I were a fan of phpBB, that would be the template I'd use. The site really looks good. I think you should drop the www from your url. It makes the url look too long and kind of akward.You might also consider using a redirect for the /forum directory. Right now, it looks like you have 2 identical websites which Google may find irritating. See, when google sees a page and reads its content, then sees the same content on another page, the second page is considered much less important. Like it is stollen and/or unoriginal content. This could negatively effect your page ranking in the future.A simple redirect rule would even maintain your links if done properly. Or you could just forward everything to the index.php.I can give you some help with the redirect if needed.Oter than that, I've bookmarked your page and hope to get a lot of use from it.vujsa

Well, I stopped by for a second the other day but I didn't have time to really review your site. Today I have a little time and here is what I found: I hope that you get your forum running so that I can take a look. Sounds like an interesting website. vujsa

I don't think that you'll need to change the paths for the new_theme images. Try a couple before you go to the trouble.Good Luck. :Pvujsa

Glad to hear you got it working. SMF templates are kind of neat in that they look in the active theam folder for an image and if it isn't there, then it searches for the image in the default template folder. This is true about nearly every aspect of the template. So, some templates are actually 90 to 95% the default template with maybe a different CSS, images, and index file. For anything else, it just looks in the default folder. So if you want to change the images, just find the location of the image and place a new image in the same folder BUT in the new themes folder: If your button is this: Themes/default/images/english/logout.gif Then put your new image here: Themes/new_theme/images/english/logout.gif I believe that that is all that you need to do. It has been a while since I have done any template editing / modifying / creating for SMF so I could be wrong. vujsa

You can remove the inline styling but that will remove the bottom border altogether. The #eeeeee is actually the background color of the rest of the box! There is other in-line styling information apart from the background information which you may not want to lose. If I were you, I'd try commenting out various code an see what happens before a complete deletion.This particualr template has a great deal of in-line styling in use. Most of this is to specify the way the individual items look. The general stuuf should be in the CSS file and the tweaking of each item should be in line but this theme is kind of wierd.Try just removing the image from the in-line style first and see if that works for you.vujsa

Well, thanks for all of the feedback, please keep it coming. Here are the cahnges / fixes I've done so far. Fixed the pathway text position. Looks nearly identical in Netscape, Firefox, and Internet Explorer now. I slightly blured the edged of the top menu buttons - is that better? Vertically centered the contenT titles. Fixed the height of the left menu buttons. Actually look like buttons again. Not sure how that got out of wack. Here is what I haven't fixed: I haven't had a chance to pad the left menu as it will take a bit of creativity. Hard coding it would cause a lot of other problems so I'll have to add some parameters to the content residing in that position. The right side content header is not as wide as the space it occupies. I'll have to find the CSS entry for this particular part of the template and get that fixed but with the nesting involved in that area, it could take some time. The website header image won't be cahnged right now because it functions and I have a bunch of other things that need to be worked on. jlhaslip, I couldn't find the "jump" you were refering to. There is a bit of a shift when a page loads that has scroll bars on it because the top of the page loads then the content loads which is when the browser realizes that the content uses more space than the screen has and scroll bars are loaded. Might I suggest that you upgrade from Netscape 7.02. I'm using NS 7.2 which has the same usability as 7.02 but obviously does a better job of reading more modern webpages. I don't really care for NS 8.1 since it behaves much differently than the NS 7.X series. As for linking or resusing tutorials here at Xisto, I am not planning to do either. I'll promote Xisto as a free web hosting service and a place to find many people that are knowledgable in PHP as well as many good PHP tutorials but there will be no direct link to the tutorials. I may use my tutorials at Xisto as inspiration for NEW tutorials at Handy PHP but the articles I have written here stay here. If a topic here comes up some day and the best answer to the question is located on my website, I'll post a link but I don't want my website to be an extention to the PHP forum here and I ddon't want Xisto to be the extention to my tutorials. yordan, that's a tough situation to be in. Here is the real problem. If you write a tutorial that you use at work, your employer can claim rights to it. They can argue that because they are paying you to do a job that contributing a helpful guide that aids you in doing your job makes the guide their property. Basically, they feel that they have paid you for the information already and as a result don't feel that you have any rights to the material. This is mre obvious with an architech. The architechs job is to design buildings. His employer pays him to design these buildings. As a result, the designs are the property of the employer. The architech can still claim that he designed the building but can not claim ownership of the plans that he drew. This is significant because if you try to make a fuss about this a work, your employer may simply say that there isn't anything that can be done since you no longer can claim ownership of the tutorials. The only way around something like this is to establish ownership of any plans or documents prior to sharing them with others. I hope everyone will continue to review my website and provide feedback. Thank You, vujsa

I believe that what you need to change is actually an image.Themes/default/images/box_bg.gifThe CSS for this theme is rather tricky. There is a CSS file entry called "headerbodies" and the tag also has an inline style attribute. The background image is defined in the style attribute of the div tag but it's position is defined in the CSS file.I think this was done so that the box would look the same in all browsers. Different browsers handle borders differently.This is why the CSS file has border information in it like you would expect if the border image was defined there but the image is actually defined in the HTML.Good luck.vujsa

First, I want to thank ALL of you for stopping by and taking a look at my website. Having a lot of input is a big help when trying to wrap things up. I think I have got some really useful feedback here. I'll try and address each item individually. I'm not sure what I can do about this. The only white "#ffffff) on the site is a little text and the serch box. I guess you could be talking about the pale aqua background I'm using. Or maybe you are talking about the whitesoace on the website. The "BLANK" areas. Those will be filled in as I add more content. You said that you didn't like the layout but didn't really specify. Is is a matter of where content is or an overall visual problem? I already have a pretty good list of tutorials that I need to write. I'll be adding a feature soon for visitors to suggest tutorials that they would be interested in having me write. As for a news box, I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you like the way that news articles are set up on my website? If this is so, I must inform you that that isn't one of my scripts. I think that I could write such a script and a tutorial for such a script but it would be a pretty advanced topic. I'll keep a more simplified newsbox in mind though. YES That isn't a random question at all. You are on a posting for hosting forum so any questions about hosting is always relative. I've been using Xisto hosting since March 2005. Since the free web hosting package here is better than most of the paid hosting packages I could afford, I haven't seen much reason to leave. I may move to a paid server someday if my bandwidth requirements exceed my quota here but if that is the case, I should be able to generate enough advertising income to pay for hosting. Wow a list. Thanks for specifying. I'll use a list to reply to each item. That has been something I have been having trouble with. I get it to work in IE then it won't work in mozilla (NS, FF, etc...) or vice versa. It also seems to be very dependant on the version of software being used. Newer versions of IE tend to read the CSS better so I might be able to finally get this issue worked out. I use Netscape which since it used the same Mozilla core as Firefox and Mozilla displays the content nearly the same. Most of the glitches have presented them selves as a result of trying to get IE to display correctly. The newest Mozilla version makes that text particularly difficyult to read in path and date line. The header was a pretty quick graphic I put together in order to get the template usable. The decorative text was an attempt to overcome the lack of visual satisfaction provided by the image. It will eventually get a makeover. Again, this is a version issue. The Netscape I normally use (about 2.5 years old now) correctly displays the text about 3px. The new Mozilla core displays the text more like it does in IE. I'll add some padding to that. I'm glad to here that you like the top menu, I lost a lot of sleep trying to develope it. It is the menu I designed for my Volkswagen website. As for the sharp edges, I think that you mean the sharp pixels which will require me to run an unsharp filter on the images? I'll give that a try. Is this text vertically aligned currently? I hadn't noticed before. I used the default Mambo template CSS for some of that stuff. I guess I have to go ahead and finish my CSS now. Is this for the header only or all of the content? The header is the same as the left side in this case. Now that you bring it up, I see a slight difference in padding on each side of the header block. Wow, that'll take a while to figure out. Thanks for letting me know what browser you are using. It would have been nice if you told me what version but I can now see that it is FireFox 1.5.0.7! I had to choose which features I wanted to work no matter what and ompromise on the other cross-browser compatibility. I think that I can adjust everything now so that it will be better interpreted by all browsers. Now that IE has decided to make an attempt to follow the standards, it will be easier. I'll have to add a best viewed notice for visitor with older browsers.Boy I tell you, it is not an easy task to design a variable width dynamic template these days. But nearly all of my spacing and posistioning issues have been resolved. I used to get the background image repeat errors when the page width was too narrow. Yeah me too. I don't care how many people use the scripts and tutorials but I want them to remember where they got the information so they can tell others. The entire purpose of my website is to provide PHP help but if all of my content is copied to other websites, then people don't have a reason to visit my site. If people don't visit, what is the point! That's why we require posts to either provide sufficient credit to the original writter or we delete the content and ban the plagiarizing member. We don't want our stuff stollen and we don't want stollen posted here. As for your first post in this topic, I noticed that I had accidentally pasted instead of copied the url information for my new website and left multiple copies of the VW site instead. The VW site has some file corruption due to some xperiments I was doing with my .htaccess files. That site will be getting a fresh installation of Joomla soon to replace the origianl Mambo installation. I'll be an ugly upgrade I can tell you now. So many mods installed. Again, thank you everyone for being candid about your opinions. I'll try to get these issues resolved ASAP. As for anyone else, please continue to review my site as I'm sure there are other issues that'll need to be resolved. When leaving suggestions reguarding how the website looks to you, please include the name and version of the browser you are using as well as the resolution of you monitor if you know it. vujsa

yordan, I don't think you should give up on the easy maintainence option so quickly. I know that the idea of trying to develope a website based on a laguage that you are just starting to learn is probably pretty scary. Since you don't have a lot of pages to edit, I think you have a great opportunity to learn as you go. There are various tutorials at Xisto that can show you how to set up an Apache server on your local system complete with PHP and MySQL that can be used to test scripts offline. The server is rather easy to set up and doesn't require many system resources unless it is serving webpages. You might give it a shot and play around with it for testing. That's how I learned. Another thing to remember is that your PHP file doesn't actually have to contain any PHP! So you can name your files .php but they will just be HTML. You can insert little bits of PHP into your pages without much programming knowledge. index.php <html> <head> <title> Sample HTML / PHP Webpage </title> <meta name="description" content=""> <meta name="keywords" content=""> <meta name="author" content="vujsa"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080"> Begin content here, but don't forget to add the date: <?php echo date('l dS \of F Y h:i:s A'); ?><br> Add more content here! </body> </html> This would give you a result like so: Pretty simple huh. Now here is what you were interested in: content.php <?php echo "Begin content here, but don't forget to add the date: ". date('l dS \of F Y h:i:s A') ."<br>\nAdd more content here!";?> index.php <html> <head> <title> Sample HTML / PHP Webpage </title> <meta name="description" content=""> <meta name="keywords" content=""> <meta name="author" content="vujsa"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080"> <? include("content.php"); ?> </body> </html> You still get the same output in the web browser when you view index.php: Now if you want to change the content, you only need to edit content.php. This isn't as useful as it would be with either a template system which I think you aren't interested in yet or if you have the same chunk of data on every page like a menu. Now that we have further reduced your ignorance, you might be less apprehensive about trying to do this. Any questions? vujsa

No, this isn't normal! That started after I was working on some auto prepend/append scripts. Some of the files became corrupt as a result and I haven't had a chance to repair the problems.Thanks for stopping by though.vujsa

Even funnier is that the topic was originally in the database forum!@#%!$#@! I move dit here and think that the user wanted to both to edit the files offline and preview the ouput generated.So I would recommend installing apache, MySQL, and PHP on your local system and use any text editor like Notepad, Notepad++, PHP Designer, CuteHTML.Keep in mind that PHP is a server side scripting language and will require you to learn basic programming skills whereas HTML is only a markup language which only modifies the text and images on a webpage. If you are using FrontPage, then you may not even fully understand the way HTML works which is a requirement if you want to design a website using PHP.The reason you need to know both HTML and PHP is because the PHP you write will simply generate HTML on the fly for you and that HTML is what the user's browser will see. Only you and your server wil see the PHP coding.vujsa

I have developed a new website using Joomla for the sharing of PHP resources. The new website, Handy PHP , is in addition to VWOne which is my Volkswagen website still in developement. Handy PHP will feature various small functions which I have written along with a number of tutorials which I feel will answer some of the more common PHP questions. The website template is derived from the template I designed for VWOne. It is a relatively clean template which is variable width but does have a few glitches when viewed in Internet Explorer. The website will eventually offer script and library downloads, links to other PHP resources, and various PHP information. So if you could stop by and take a look at Handy PHP and let me know what you think, that would be great. Any feedback will be helpful and will be considered. I usually make better progress from negtive feedback so don't be shy. I'm a big boy and understand that my site is far from perfect. Thanks, vujsa

One additional problem with SSI is that most servers require you to rename your file extentions to .shtml! How many files do you have? It is possible to write a small script that change all of your internal links and save the file with the .php extention. As for the forwarding of your old HTML request to your new PHP files take a look here: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/88716-topic/?findpost=1064337857 What was it that seemed to be so much work? If it is changing all of the extentions, then I think I can help out with a simple script to change everything over. If it is editing your files to insert the PHP code, I can't really help there because more than likely there isn't enough of a pattern to your sight for a search and replace script. If all of your pages use pretty much the same layout, then it might be possible to replace your existing content with a PHP code. For example if you have the exact same menu on every page, then we can do a search and replcae based on that pattern. I'm more than happy to give you a hand with this if you want and I can show you the most simplified methods possible. Remember, if we are going to forward all of your old HTML requests to your new PHP files, then fixing all of the internal links doesn't have to happen right away since the request will get to the right place anyway. So just by adding the forwarding rule and changing all of your extentions, your website would continue to work but would now be PHP ready. Your PHP files don't actually have to contain PHP to work. Hope this helps. vujsa

ImageMagick 6.0.7 is installed on the free web hosting server. So yes, I think it would be good to continue to have. :)I'm sorry, I don't know the path if your script is requiring it. I have a script that can use it but I and my script both prefer GD2 so we don't use ImageMagick but the script was able to detect it.vujsa

Yep, and here is why. PHP should be parsed as PHP and HTML should be left alone to do its thing. Problems begin to arrise when you start messing around with your handlers. If you slowly begin to convert your website over to PHP generated, then eventually you'll have all PHP file anyhow. I guess my point is that if you are going to do something like this, then you might as well do it right the first time. Eventually, most of you HTML requests will disapear and only PHP requests will be left. The rewrite rule is just to prevent you old links from being dead. If you set it up correctly, the search engine spiders will even update your links instead of creating new ons in their database. My advice is to update your files with whatever PHP you want or need to use and just Save As a PHP file instead of HTML. You'll have to edit most of your files anyhow to insert the PHP that is required so it wont really be much more work to save it as PHP other than updating any internal links from .htm to .php. vujsa

Take a look at this and see if it is along the lines of what you are wanting to do. CMS101 - Content Management System Design If that is what you are wanting to do then you got some work to do... First, you'll have to change the extention of all of the files that want to use php in from .html to .php! Second, you'll have to edit all of those pages again but this time to replace the frequently edited material with the php include code. Third, create the various files that you wish to include in you web pages. Forth, add a rewrite rule to your .htaccess file to forward page requests for your .html files to your new .php files. This seems like a lot of work but the end result will really save you a bunch of time in the future because like you said, you could edite a single file to make major changes to your entire website. This type of system can be as simple as just inserting the file contents at the place specified in the webpage to allowing you to use a single template file with various modules and files for website tools and content. I can help you with the basic coding for either option but the overall system will be up to you to design since you are the one that has to use it. Just let me know what information you are interested in and I'll try my best to explain how to do it. If you are intersted in a more complex system where a single template file is used, this will require the use of complex urls like index.php?this=1&that=2&other=3 Also, have you considered using a CMS program like Joomla? vujsa

Wow, so much disucussion about such a simple thing:goto cPanel > Index Manager This will give a error 403 Forbidden if there isn't an index.*** available.The other option is to just put an index.html/php/asp/ext in each directory with no data in it. This will display a blank page if the directory is acessed without a page specified.Hope This Helps. :)vujsa

Using the IP address to get to cPanel is not a good idea because from time to time, the server's IP address is changed. This reduces the number of attacks on the server. Usually when the server is upgraded the current one isn't taken offline until the new one is running. When it is time to change to the new server, the IP address for the DNS is simply change to the new server's IP address. You should be using the following: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ or http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ This will never change! Not sure why people try to use the IP address but it isn't the best case scenerio. You ftp account is like so: server: ftp.niranvv.com username: niran password: ******** For web accessable anonymous ftp access, here is the address to use: anonymous%40niranvv.com%40niranvv.com anonymous%40username.astahost.com%40username.astahost.com This would be for allowing people access to your public ftp folder for downloads. If you have further questions please let us know. Hope This Helps. vujsa

I'm guessing that the page uses an external JavaScript file which wouldn't be downloaded with the rest of the page. IT works from the same computer off of the flash because the HTML page is just requesting the external file from over the internet. There really isn't a very good solution for this problem because in order to get this to work on an offline system, you also need to save the JS files and edit the HTML files to look in the right place for the JS file on your local drive (Flash Drive). Are you trying to mimic the effect or just trying to do some offline browsing? This seems like a lot of trouble to me, I think you may want to consider getting a home connection. There are some free services availible but are dial-up if you look around. has a 10 free hours a month program if you have phone access to them. Hope This Helps.

Well, the only thing you HAVE to do is create a file named "404.shtml" and place it in any directory that my be requested. The easier way is to create a .htaccess file in the root of your website and add the following line: ErrorDocument 404 /404.html You can then create what ever file you want. And you can create other error message documents depending on what you need: ErrorDocument 403 /403.htmlErrorDocument 404 /404.htmlErrorDocument 500 /500.html You can have different .htaccess files in different directories to handle different page requests differently. The .htaccess file can also include text instead of a file like so: ErrorDocument 404 "Man, I have no idea where I put that file! I'm not even sure that I had that file now that I think about it." There are certain environmental variables that you can use in your error documents. Check your cPanel "Custom Eror Pages." for more information. Hope this helps. vujsa

I think that if this becomes reality that there should be more criteria to rank the resource by. Functional - Does it work (1 - 5) Security - Is it secure (1 - 5) Ease of use - Is it easy (1 - 5) Expandability - Can it be modified (1 - 5) Overall Usefulness - Is it practical (1 - 5) Optimized - Will it kill my server (1 - 5) Then based on the average of the categories, give the resource an overall rating. I'd be happy to help in my spare time. Got so many projects to deal with now. Here is my newest project which seems to apply to this topic: Handy PHP It is still in developement but I think will become a helpful resource for PHP users in the future since I'll attampt to address the most common PHP questions asked in the forums. vujsa

So, I'm guessing that you still need help since you question wasn't actually answered. In fact, your question wans't even addressed in the reply. I did understand that you needed help with setting up your database so you could install SMF not that you wanted someone to reword the SMF installation instructions correct? Anyway, depending on the type of server you have, there a few different requirements for setting up a database. If your host provides you with a single database, then you need only ask them what the database name, username, and password is for the database and then enter that information into the SMF istaller form. If you have a host with cPanel, then you need to create a database to use by clinking the "MySQL Databases" link under the "Site Management" header. Then create a user for the new database and set the user's permissions. Then enter that information into the SMF installer. Usually, with cPanel you will also get a large package of preinstalled FREE web scripts including SMF which you can install and the server will do all of the database set up for you. Xisto offers cPanel and all of the preinstalled scripts if you get hosting here. If you are trying to install SMF on your home system or test server, then you will first need to install MySQL on that system or server. The set up for a database on a non-hosted server in much more tricky and will require you to provide us with more information about the system you are using. Hope This Helps. vujsa

I approved the post shortly after I read Vyoma's reply and of course after a brief review of the topic.That isn't a forum that I regularly check so it didn't get approved right away.vujsa