Article System

Alright, here's my Beta... Do not even touch this unless you know what you're doing! To upgrade to future versions you WILL have to have a fair amount of knowledge about templates and other things.

I need help with an installer and any feedback and suggestions on things to add/do

An example of it can be found running here.

All code made and testing on VB 3.0.0 and shouldn't have any issues with 3.0.1 or any future releases. This doesn't relay on any Vbulletin templates. The only vbulletin functions it uses is basic template and DB connectivity.

The support on this will be VERY limited. I only need people that know enough to be helpful in tracking down bugs that they may find. I'm very busy during the week. You'll want to edit index.php and add links to any of the admin functions you want.

I covered alot here

NEW STUFF:
Hialls is helping me with the installer and helping add some things that will help you guys use and install this alot easier.

Go ahead and check this system out and tell me what needs to be added and I'll see about adding it to my additions list

[Pro]

lol... ive never done that before...?

i'm a noob - is there anywhere to learn this?

[ixian]

Originally Posted by krohnathlonman

Whats the best way to handle a multi page submission like that? just have say 2 pages at a time and post them into hidden form elements?

I wrote this completely with the display end speed in mind. I had to make sure it could handle 150k+ pageviews a day because my site spikes up there often enough that I have to worry about it. I don't want my server crawling from it. In the next release you'll see in the admin panel where it's real easy to turn features off. I'm also writing some global variables for you guys to define!

Thanks for point that <> out... I overlooked it! I'll start testing it after I get my feature list taken care of Something that big will be one of the last things I do! I want to make sure everythings stable and working great before I throw something as big as that into the mix.

This shouldn't affect display speed, it's all on the admin side.

The best way for THIS hack, I think, is as I kind of went into above:

Have ONE text area on the submit page.

Instead of one submit button, have two - one that says submit, one "Next Page" or "Continue" or whatever.

If the user hits submit, that means they are done adding pages, and the article is submitted exactly as it is done now.

If they hit "Next Page", then you have a subroutine that:

Submits the textarea data in the form to it's space in the db table.

Brings up a new window, textarea field called p2 like you have it now.

And so on.


OR

Have it be all one page for submitting the form/textarea data, and have the user insert a custom tag like <pagebreak> or something where they want new pages to start. Adding a button to do that automatically in HTMLArea - so the user just puts the cursor where they want the new page to start and clicks "New Page" - is so simple it's not even funny.

Now, I know you are worried about load, and that is a valid concern of course. However, you are missing something here. The <pagebreak> tag I talk about above isn't something that gets processed every time someone views an article. It's post-processing done when you submit the article. In fact, your article.php and the rest of your code won't need to be modified at all. Just the add article file.

What you do is add a routine for the pagebreak tag, and have each section submit to your table/pages. Something like this:

PHP Code:

$textarray=spliti("\[PAGEBREAK]",$text); 


Would work. Use spliti to split the text for you (spliti is case-insensitive unlike split). Now you have php doing all the work for you when you submit an article. And as I said, this is NOT done on the viewing side - it doesn't change a thing. This is all done on the submit side.

If you want, when you get your latest changes uploaded (you really need something to handle categories, but you already know that) I'd be happy to work on part of this for you. Just let me know.

[ixian]

Originally Posted by Pro

lol... ive never done that before...?

i'm a noob - is there anywhere to learn this?

Go to your admin cp.

Scroll down to where you see "Import and Maintenance"

Click it.

Click "execute a SQL query".

Paste in the text from the articles.sql file.

Done.

BACK UP your database first.

[Pro]

An error occurred while attempting to execute your query. The following information was returned.
error number: 1064
error desc: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ';

CREATE TABLE amartinref (
article smallint(6) NOT NULL

could this be from installing phpMyAdmin tonight??? :\

please help - i would like to get this articles program up and running!

[ixian]

No, phpadmin would have nothing to do with it. But if you have phpadmin why aren't you using that? Use the SQL option on the vbulletin db and paste the text in there.

I think, now that I think about it (pun!) that vb's sql query feature restricts you to one query at a time. That's probably the issue there.

[Jon Ward]

Hi everyone -

A small problem which may also need correcting in a future release ...

Like many people I choose to adopt a prefix when setting up database tables to identify which script they belong to - this is an option for VBulletin, of course.

However, this causes a problem with articles.php in at least one SQL statement (c line 35) where hard reference is made to 'thread', one of the (unprefixed) VB table names. (The prefix setting config.php in /includes doesn't figure in the proceedings ...) There may well be other instances

Thanks K and everyone else helping this project through!

Jon

[The Dok]

when I call up the forum/articles.php all I get is a white page. I've looked over the install instructions and everything looks correct... but seeing that I'm an extreme noobie to this stuff, I don't know. Any thing I need to look at specifically?

Thanks

[Silverdawn222]

Did the template files you created go into the right style?

[The Dok]

Yes, I only have one available to the members.

[Pro]

Originally Posted by ixian

No, phpadmin would have nothing to do with it. But if you have phpadmin why aren't you using that? Use the SQL option on the vbulletin db and paste the text in there.

I think, now that I think about it (pun!) that vb's sql query feature restricts you to one query at a time. That's probably the issue there.

i'm still trying to set it all up (phpMyAdmin)... but this stuff is confusing! lol

when i try to set THIS up i get THIS error lol...

MySQL said:


#1045 - Access denied for user: 'root@localhost' (Using password: NO)

i thought i edited the config file right... guess not... im not sure how to connect it to my database..