Scribblings from Steve
Well today I decided to pull over all my old posts from the blog on Camsigh.
Using the export and import features of WordPress made it a breeze.
Now all I have to do is go through all the posts, remove a few that are now redundant, put each post into the correct categories and then tag the posts with appropriate tags.
Well I sat down the other day and decided that I wasn’t happy with how Camsigh looked. I’d bolted a Blog mod onto the PHPBB forum and it was having problems with spammers and the code was rather messy. I’d also got functionality in the main board that I didn’t actually use – basically because it had been superceded by RSS feeds.
So I looked around and found that I liked WordPress and someone actually did a plug in that integrated it into PHPBB.
So some hacking around of WordPress and PHPBB and some tidying up and it all looked good.
To finish it all off I moved the board. Camsigh had been sitting in /board/ on one of my domains and I wanted to tidy things up so I registered another domain through DynDNS and made the appropriate adjustments inside the Board to get it working. I then put a rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the original directory to do forced re-writes to the new domain. Finally as I’d been doing all the reconfiguration work in a new database I had to export the user posts and private messages, search and replace any domain references (I use a PHPBB mod that allows you to upload and insert pictures) which had got buried in the posts.
Did I say that was it? Well it wasn’t: I then moved the posts from the old Blogging system into WordPress. Its not 100% correct but its near enough. There also seem to be a few navigational issues… which I’m looking into
I’ve coded up a couple of mods for phpbb
and
The total down loads of these two mods is not huge but its not zero.
There was a bug in the Registration Variable MOD that no-one noticed.. or if they did notice they didn’t think to tell me.
If I download a MOD, especially a new one, I always try to comment on it, even if there aren’t any problems.
The people running PHPBB are wondering why people aren’t submitting MODS to their MODS database.
I suspect the answer is apathy. A lot of mods are coded up by people because they want to fix a specific problem or add a specific feature to their board. As an act of goodwill they release the change as a mod so that others can benefit. Those others take that code and then don’t bother getting back to the author if there are bugs or obvious enhancements.
Maybe its about time a lot of people using PHPBB put something back into the PHPBB community rather than just leaching off it all the time.
I’d been looking round for quite a bit for a nice acronym explainer for PHPBB… I found quite a few but none of them did what I wanted.
So I took a couple of existing mods and hacked them round a bit and have produced just what I wanted:
1) Centrally maintained definitions
2) Proper formatting of definitions (i,e, full phpbb code)
3) Nice sized pop up when you move over the word/phrase
4) Word/Phrase is also a link to a post containing the definition.
OK maybe other people will think its rubbish.. but I like it 😉
In the background I’ve been working on a complete overhaul of the Camsigh Forums.
I put the site up in January 2004 and I’ve bolted a few things on since then, but it was all getting very messy and tired so I’ve been building up a new version in my spare time.
Hopefully over the weekend I’ll get round to cutting the data over (not as easy as it sounds as there is some crud lying round in the existing database), and then users will have a nice new looking forum with some new features (like being able to post pictures directly into posts)
Well I’m quite pleased with myself. The mod to support google ads in the phpbb forums only handles text ads. I wanted to put in some of the referrer ads so I wrote a little bit of php code which sets up an array with the different ads in and then picks one at Random.
I also dropped the code to put random Google “Pack” adverts into this blog mod which works quite well 😉