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CHAPTER 13 INTRODUCING WORDPRESS 371 the top of the page. The entries were links to interesting web pages, the latest news stories with commentary and opinions, or essays and personal stories. And they always had links to other people s weblogs. Early pioneers were Jesse James Garrett, Cameron Barrett, Peter Merholz, and Brigitte Eaton, among many others. But these sites were still essentially maintained by hand with page-creation applications or homegrown software. In 1999, services like Pitas.com (http://www.pitas.com/), Blogger (http://blogger.com/), and Groksoup (no longer online) were launched, suddenly making it incredibly easy (and free) to create, publish, and maintain your own blog. Desktop software like Radio UserLand (http:// radio.userland.com/) allowed you to publish your blog easily from the desktop. You could install server-based software like Greymatter (http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/) and Movable Type (http://sixapart.com/) on your own server or shared hosting service to publish your blog. The final ingredient to the explosion of blogs and blogging is comments. Some blogging software allows you to have comments. Other blogging tools can make use of third-party services like HaloScan (http://www.haloscan.com/) or YACCS (http://rateyourmusic.com/yaccs/) for commenting. So much more than guest books, which were common and allowed you to get feedback on your site, comments allow you to get feedback on your individual stories. Was the review any good? What do other people think of the news item you just blogged about? With blog publishing software and user comments, the Web became truly interactive. A simple post on your opinion of the latest blockbuster movie can trigger a conversation that continues for days. This involves not just each reader interacting with you, but also your readers interacting with each other. You can easily build up quite a community of like-minded people, or even unlike-minded people if you enjoy a good debate. Weblogs as journals can also be used as a stream-of-consciousness publishing tool, where a blogger writes and comments on anything and everything. A lot of bloggers publish opinionated commentary on a wide range of topics. Other people blog as a means of keeping family and friends updated about their lives. Today, it is easy to have your voice heard all the way across the world, to publish your thoughts and opinions, and to have anyone and everyone join your conversation. You simply pick any of several online services or choose one of many software packages, and you can be talking to the world in hours, if not minutes. Weblog Software Today s weblog publishing software can be broadly categorized in two ways: the type of software and the method of publishing. Here, I ll describe these categories, as well as the disadvantages and advantages of each publishing method. Types of Blogging Software Three main types of blogging software are available: Desktop-based: These applications allow you to develop your content on your desktop, possibly offline, and publish to either a hosted service or your own server. Examples include Radio UserLand (http://radio.userland.com/), ecto (http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/), and iBlog (http://www.lifli.com/Products/iBlog/main.htm).
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370 CHAPTER 13 INTRODUCING WORDPRESS After Tim s page, came the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) What s New page (now archived at http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/ Docs/whats-new.html), which ran from 1993 to 1996. Significantly, this page dated its entries, with the newest entries at the top of the page. Each month, NCSA started a new page and created a link to the previous pages, forming the archives. As the Web grew, personal pages began to appear. They were created by people studying and working in universities, as these were often the only people who had access to the Web. Their sites usually contained links to papers and research materials pertinent to a their academic projects. Soon, as a natural progression, because people want to talk about themselves and share their interests, many of these pages became personalized. They contained items such as a bit of personal history or someone s opinion of the latest Star Trek movie and links to other Trek fans pages. They also sometimes included links to the older pages, the archives. With the growth and commercialization of the Web, personal pages soon became available to the general public. Companies began providing a little Web space to individuals, and pretty soon every Tom, Dick, and Harriet had their own homepage. These were filled with content such as pictures of their pets, detailed essays about themselves and their hobbies, or pages in praise of their favorite pop group. And always, there were links links to other people who shared their passion, links to new and interesting pages on the Web, links to other people s pages of links, and so on. People were publishing themselves. People were finding their voices and inviting the world to hear. These pages became the precursor to the other side of blogging: journals or personal diaries. The Beginnings of Publishing Software In those pioneering days, it wasn t easy to make your own web page. One of the earliest barriers to publishing web pages was the technology. You needed to learn the language of the Web, HTML, and the mechanics of publishing your pages, FTP. You could create web pages by hand, but soon there were many tools to help you with this endeavor. As HTML and the Web matured, the techniques available to use on web pages grew at an incredible pace. Pages became more and more sophisticated. There were new ways to present your pages: JavaScript menus, frames, dynamic HTML, and more. The publishing tools evolved to keep up with these techniques. Each new page you created could take advantage of the newest tools and techniques. But what about your old pages? Maintenance became a big problem. Should you go back and manually re-create your old pages in the newest style to match your site? Or should you leave them alone, even though they often looked out of place and disjointed? Many sites were abandoned after their initial creation because of this dilemma; the cost of maintenance was too high. Commercial sites had already realized this problem and were solving it with big, complicated, and expensive content management systems (CMS). These systems were often created in-house or were prohibitively expensive for Joe Public. They were certainly not suitable for someone who only wanted to publish pictures of the new kittens or had decided that every page now needed to have that great animated butterfly GIF she just found. True Weblogs Weblogs as we now know them emerged in the late 1990s (the term was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997) in what is now the established weblog format: dated entries with the newest first, at
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Introducing WordPress CHAPTER 1 3 This chapter provides an introduction to blogging and weblog software in general, and to the specific software you ll be using in this part of the book: WordPress. I ll begin with a little of the history behind blogging and blogging software. Next, I ll describe the types of blogging software available. Then I will present some of the common terminology used in connection with blogging and blogging software. Finally, I ll give you an overview of WordPress s main features. A Brief History of Blogging In the beginning was the Web. I know you know what the Web is, but you may not know that the first web site, created by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, is now recognized by some as the very first weblog. Note Tim Berners-Lee s original server and content was located at http://info.cern.ch/, but is no longer available. The content has been archived at the World Wide Web Consortium site (http://www.w3.org/ History.html). The page that could be described as the first weblog is at http://www.w3.org/History/ 19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/News/9201.html. Tim originally developed the Web as a more convenient way for people to publish their academic papers. More important, the Web provided a way to hyperlink between papers on different machines. People soon created gateways from the Web to the data already published using older technology like FTP, Gopher, and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). As more and more of this information came online, it became impossible to keep track of what there was and where it was. Weblogs: Guides to the Web On that original web server, Tim maintained a What s New? newsletter that included news about developments in the technology of the Web. He also wrote about, and linked to, new sites as they came online. Naturally, Tim s page included a brief description of these new places on the Web, and often Tim added his opinion of them. This style of web page periodic, subject- specific, linking to interesting sites with commentary is the very essence of the first weblogs.
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366 CHAPTER 12 STYLING PHPBB to set off phpBB 3.0 template files from phpBB 2.0 template files, which is a nice way to avoid any confusion. Additionally, the Administration panel in version 3.0 is no longer skinnable, ending the days of all-black Administration panels due to mistakes creating themes. This is a very smart move on the phpBB developers part! Summary In these six chapters, you ve come quite a long way. You have installed and configured a stock phpBB installation, learned the ins and outs of phpBB s end-user features for your benefit as a user and as an administrator, learned best practices for keeping your phpBB stable and secure, modified your phpBB and installed additional features, and tied it all together with a style that puts a nice finishing touch on your hard work. Now it s time to relax a bit and enjoy running your community. Get the word out on the various phpBB showcase forums around the Internet. Register your site in Google and the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org) so it can be found via search engines, and don t forget to watch for phpBB updates. The next part of this book is about WordPress, a versatile blogging application that runs on the same platform as phpBB does.
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CHAPTER 12 STYLING PHPBB 365 You may want to force a default theme if you wish to maintain only one template for your site. Also, you may wish to enable this option if your phpBB is well integrated into your site, or you have hacks that you ve installed for your default template and not in any others. This way, you can ensure an optimum viewing experience for your community. Touring phpBB 3.0 Templating Improvements phpBB 3.0 introduces a few improvements to templating. A smarter and more flexible templating engine provides even more customization possibilities, with far fewer dives into the PHP scripting code required a winning situation in terms of reliability and efficiency in development. The downside to these improvements is that existing phpBB 2.0 styles are considered totally incompatible with phpBB 3.0, and they will need to be reworked to accommodate the new version s changes. Caution The information in this section at the time of this writing is based on prerelease software and is subject to change at any time. For template designers, a lot has changed, and for the better. Here s a list of the new things you ll be able to accomplish with phpBB 3.0: Use conditional structures: Potentially the biggest reason to switch to phpBB 3.0, from a designer s perspective, is the ability to use conditional structures, commonly known as if statements, directly in the templating engine. This will give designers unprecedented flexibility in customizing their templates without needing to touch a single line of raw PHP. This also benefits people working inside the core phpBB code, as virtually all of the formatting has been offloaded onto the templating engine. Previously, there was some work being done by the PHP script, but this is no longer the case. This is the landmark feature of the phpBB 3.0 template system, without a doubt. Embed PHP: The phpBB Group has added the option to embed PHP code inside a template, which is welcome news to people who run ad-rotation code and other scripts inside their phpBB installation. Previously, these users had to edit the codebase and add a template variable to output the results of their scripts, and then edit their templates and add the template variable. While the phpBB Group still recommends that you use the template variables, as they will be fastest, the INCLUDEPHPdirective will permit you to bring in PHP files from the outside. Or, you can declare a PHP block and execute a few lines directly inside the block. Either way, the flexibility is very nice. Add common elements easily: Thanks to the new INCLUDE directive, templates are now able to include other template files directly. Previously, a great number of code hacks were required. Some operational changes also impact designers. One is that phpBB 3.0 templates now use a standard .html extension instead of the .tpl extension. This helps people avoid having to set up their editors to do syntax highlighting on the .tpl files. The new extension also helps
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364 CHAPTER 12 STYLING PHPBB By setting this theme for your profile, you are not changing settings for the rest of the board. This is purely a per-user setting. As a result, this feature works only for registered users. All guest users will see the default theme that you set up, as described in the next section. Note If you see PHP error messages concerning template.php after switching to a new theme, the theme likely contains errors. Contact the author of the theme. If you wrote the theme, go through your header and footer template files to ensure there are no problems with syntax. If the error occurs on one specific page, edit the template file that page calls to make sure there are no mistakes causing the template engine to fail. Setting a Default Theme You can make a theme you ve installed the default theme for all guests and users who don t otherwise have a preference set. To do this, go to the Administration panel and click the Configuration link under General Admin. Find Default Style, and select the option from the menu that corresponds to your desired theme. The screen should resemble Figure 12-3. Figure 12-3. Setting the default theme, board-wide Note that setting this option does not force the theme on all your users. They are still free to change to whichever themes you offer. Forcing the use of your theme is described next. Note If users report they can t switch their theme, check to make sure you haven t locked down theme switching (see Figure 12-4). If that isn t the case, make sure your other themes are installed properly. Also remember that users must be logged in to switch themes. Forcing Your Default Theme If you wish to force your users to use your chosen theme, regardless of their theme preferences, you can set the Override user style option to Yes, as shown in Figure 12-4. This disables user theme switching on the board. Figure 12-4. Setting the default theme to override user preferences, effectively shutting down user theme switching
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CHAPTER 12 STYLING PHPBB 363 Uploading and Installing the Theme After checking those few items, go ahead and upload the folder containing the corresponding template files to /templates. After uploading, log in to your Administration panel. In the navigation pane, click the Add link underneath Styles Admin. With any luck, you ll see one or more styles (depending on how many styles the template author bundled with the template file) available to be installed. In Figure 12-1, I m given the option to install Athena and Athena Orange, two themes based on the Athena template, available from phpBBStyles.com. Figure 12-1. The theme installation page Note If the style does not show up as an available theme, make sure the folder name and the .cfg file match each other properly. Case and spacing matter. Additionally, recheck the theme_info.cfg file and ensure the theme name is set to the name of the folder as well, and the path is pointing to the proper folder name. To install a theme, click the Install link next to your desired theme s listing in the table. Installing a theme adds the information in its configuration file to the database, making it available to you and your users. Using Your Themes Congratulations! You ve successfully installed a theme or two. Now that you ve done that, you can make them available to your users, and perhaps even set one of these new themes as the default for your site. Setting Your Preferred Theme You can switch to the theme you wish to use on the board by editing your profile, scrolling down to the Preferences heading, and selecting the option in the Board Style drop-down list that corresponds with the name of the theme you wish to use. Figure 12-2 shows an example with two themes available. ofile
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362 CHAPTER 12 STYLING PHPBB Getting Help with Templates As you ve seen, the phpBB template engine gives you a great deal of flexibility in styling just about every aspect of your community. For people just getting started with theming phpBB, having all these options can be overwhelming. You might run into problems or have questions on how to further expand the use of the template engine on your site. As always, the phpBB community is ready and willing to help you out when you run into problems. Try the resources at sites such as phpBBStyles.com, which specializes in creating templates for phpBB. Often, sites like these contain extensive tutorials, tips, and tricks for templating your board. Naturally, they also have forums for discussion and help on creating themes. Sites like these often have showcases for getting feedback on templates, which is especially useful if you are considering releasing the template to the public. phpBB.com and phpBBHacks.com also provide extensive support for template authors, with similar information available on both sites. The support is out there don t be hesitant to use it! Installing and Using Themes Whether you downloaded your theme from the Internet or created it from scratch, the next step is to get it installed to the phpBB database so the script actually knows how to use it. As with a lot of features in phpBB, the process is straightforward, making for a smooth transition. Adding Templates and Styles to phpBB Adding new themes to your board is as simple as extracting the theme to your hard drive, uploading the resulting folder, and selecting it from a list in the Administration panel. Here s how to do exactly that. Preparing to Install the Theme In most cases, you ll receive your templates in the form of a compressed file of some kind (usually a .zip file). You ll want to extract the contents of the compressed file to its own temporary folder, so you can upload it to the server. Make sure you enable the option to keep the paths of the folders intact (which your archive extraction program will usually have enabled by default). This will help you immensely when uploading to the server. After you ve extracted the files, you should see a folder with the name of the theme. Open that folder to see what s inside. Ideally, you will see a bunch of files with a tpl extension. Try to find a file that bears the name of the folder with a cfgextension. For example, if the folder s name is SnazzyTheme, you will want to locate SnazzyTheme.cfg, with the case and spelling (except for the file extension) identical to the folder name. Next, open theme_info.cfg in any text editor and make sure you set the template name variable (the first one) to the name of the folder. This step ensures that phpBB will pick up the theme in its installer utility. Prepackaged themes generally have these bases covered, but it never hurts to double-check, as it can save you some troubleshooting time later. If you find problems with a theme, make sure you notify the theme s author so he can fix the theme and redistribute it.
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CHAPTER 12 STYLING PHPBB 361 For the Really Ambitious: Styling BBCode One of the unique features of phpBB 2.0 is that the BBCode functionality is now fully customizable via the template mechanism. Previous BBCode implementations hard-coded the formatting into the software, so this is a welcome addition. You can edit the blocks of BBCode by opening bbcode.tpl in your theme s directory. This step is entirely optional, but if done right, it can be a major enhancement to your board. One of my favorite modifications for the BBCode template is to edit the [URL] BBCode to display the location of the hyperlink in an HTML titleattribute inside the hyperlink. This way, when a user rolls over the link, the true destination of the link shows up in a tool tip. This can help foil pranksters and help cut down on people clicking links and then regretting that click. Here s how to do this: 1. Open bbcode.tpl and navigate to around line 58, which will begin with . 2. Near the end of the hyperlink code, by class=”postlink”, insert the following small piece of code before the right-angle bracket: title=”{URL}” 3. Save bbcode.tpland upload it to your server in the templates/yourtemplate directory. 4. Visit your board and look for a hyperlink embedded in one of the posts. With any luck, hovering over the hyperlink will display the target URL of the link in a tool tip. (All browsers since Internet Explorer 4.0, Netscape 6.0, and Mozilla will display these tool tips.) Testing Your Templates Now that you have customized your template, you will want to test it thoroughly to ensure there are no major problems. I recommend testing your template at different screen resolutions and in different browsers to ensure accessibility and platform parity between browsers. If at lower resolutions you have horizontal scroll bars on your page, for example, you will want to revisit some of your code to see if these can be prevented. Remember that you want your community to be as clean-looking as possible in as many browsers as possible, to make it inviting to your users. With the recent rise in usage of alternative browsers, you can t afford to target your site to one particular platform, because that could make your community uninviting to those who choose not to use that platform. Tip A Mozilla Firefox extension provides a very handy toolbar for debugging and testing your web sites, including your phpBB templates. Visit https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=60 to download and install the Web Developer Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox. It works with all current versions of Firefox and can be quite a lifesaver!
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