DO?s and DON?Ts

[StarBuG]

Hi!

I?m not a real coder but fanatic hacker :D

DO?s

a) ALWAYS BACKUP your DB befor hacking!!!!!!!!
b) ALWAYS BACKUP your Boardfiles befor you start to hack!!!!
c) Always read instructions carefully and check twice step by step that you don?t miss any code. If you have done a big hack and it doesn?t work it?s much harder to go through the whole hack again.


DON?Ts

a) NEVER "search" and "replace" (as often told in the install instructions) BLIND! Check the code for changes made and integrade them by hand! If you always do this you will get no problems with hacks when your board gets more and more "hacked" and you don?t find the "search" code anymore.
b) If you have to replace a code DON?T do it!
Do a
// OLD // infront of it (if you write in php files)
<!-- code --> (if you write in HTML)
and after it add the new code! If you do this you will never have problems to find code in your files even if a hack changed it before! ;)
c) NEVER hack your board online! Install a webserver on your compi and hack your board offline! If the hack works you can easylie copy it to your online Board! A very good and all in one webserver is "FoxServ" you can get it here:
http://foxserv.linuxmax.net/portal.php


If I missed some tips i will add them later but this I think is a good start for everyone!

Hehe

Greetings

StarBuG

[Moonwolf]

Neat lists. Here's one of mine:

Get a text editor that will show you line numbers, it makes tracking down errors your pages spew at you easier. A good one is GTEdit (www.gtesoft.com, a nagware editor (after 30 days it'll pop up a registration reminder every now and again, but is otherwise complete). It's got another advantage in that you can use it to upload your edited text file via ftp right from the editor, and it keeps backups too.

Oh, and when hacking, remember to count your brackets :)

Kathi

[StarBuG]

I personaly prefere "UltraEdit32" at: http://www.ultraedit.com/

It is the best editor for coding (my opinion) cause it knows many languages and marks the code colored.
(for ex: If u have a html file all html tags are in color so u see if u make a typo its grey and not the normal color (blue) ;))
Linenumbers are also no problem! hehe

Greetings

StarBuG

[Dade]

Hey thanks for the offline server thing :D

[TELEK]

since you guys are talking about text editors, do any of those have a search feature? Like kind of how Internet Explorers "Find on this page" works?

[StarBuG]

Of course they have a search feature!
Ultraedit has:

a) search in this file
b) search in files (open/selected/...)
also replace and so many more features..

just check it out!

Geetings

StarBuG

ps: I don?t think this thread is about "Texteditors" it?s about "Do?s and Don?ts" :D