Welcome to Geeklog, Anonymous Wednesday, October 09 2024 @ 12:43 pm EDT
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GeekLog Introduction/Tutorial
epretorious
Eric P.
Sunnyvale, CA
dreamscape
I'm having a difficult time wrapping my mind around the concept of blogs (I'm more acustomed to bulletin board sites and more typical CGI-driven sites) but I'm really interested in GL- It's very attractive even to an inexperienced blog user like myself.
weblogs: A blog (weblog) is normally a web page that is frequently updated with short posts arranged in chronological order. You can think of a blog as an online journal.
Is GeekLog a blog? Not in the truest sense of the word, it has grown to be a lot more than a blog, and more into a full blown CMS site along the lines of slash (/.), phpnuke, postnuke, etc. However, you can use GeekLog to purely make a blog.
The Future holds a lot more for geeklog. It should develop into a full blown web application container so to speak, handling the internals (security, user accounts, and some glue code to let other peices use the database etc), but will use other applications called modules to actually create your site. At this point, it will be very easy for someone to go from just a "blog" homepage, to a family website with photo gallerys, links, anniversaries and stories, to a full blown corporate intranet, etc.
Where can an inexperienced user/admin find a more complete introduction to GL? (e.g., plugins, blocks, and themes - What they are? Where to find them? How they're usually installed?) Or maybe some information about installing/configuring GL?
Themes: are a very small slices of a template page. Essentially very creative types will design something really cool in gimp or photoshop or equivalent, slice it up, and start coding the peices into these small template files. Geeklog then takes these little template files and rebuilds the page to be displayed to the user, filling in variable information on the way. In this manner template designers leave a place holder, something like , and geeklog will replace with an image link pointing to your sites graphic.
Blocks: There are actually several different types of blocks, so I'll describe them seperately.
- Normal Block: essentially this is a small area where you can put any markup you want. Some people use this to put backlink graphics (those nifty little buttons that have the site name for other people to use to link to your site). You can use it for anything, a static message to users, anything.
- PHP Block: this is a block that allows some coding (php) behind it. You traditionally build your phpblock_function() in lib-custom.php (so it doesn't get wiped out during an upgrade) and have it return your output. There are several examples of these, shoutbox, the random image block, weather block, sports block. You can find almost all published phpblocks at http://squatty.com
- Portal Block: is a way to syndicate news from other sites. Thousands and thousands of sites publish an RDF that adheres to standards and can be parsed by Geeklog. Geeklog will then display that information in a block, it could be stories (titles linked to the story) from other geeklog sites, it could be the new inventory at thinkgeek.
Plug-ins: are more sophisticated that phpblocks, you can think of them as tiny applications that need to use the geeklog security and user module. The static pages plugin is an example, so is the journal plugin and the "classified ads" plugin. I think again, squatty is the place to go for phpblocks and plugins. However, gxblock has the journal plugin I think. And the classified plugin is Dirk's, at www.geeklog.info warning to filthy americans that only speak english -- it's in German. (I speak only english). Dirk might actually have this somewhere else.
Configuration: should mostly be handled by the config.php file you have, there are a couple exceptions, image size restrictions.
Installation: seems to be the bane of our existance. We're trying to figure out how to make the documentation better and more complete (anyone with ideas is strongly encouraged to submit ideas to either geeklog-devel@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list or come talk to use on #geeklog on opn. )
Finding out more: depends on how you learn. You can install it and start tinkering. You can come hang out in #geeklog and listen or chat with us. Subscribe to the mailing lists and listen to what other people are talking about, and go read through the archives to see where we are, etc.
Hopefully that gets you close......
efarmboy
How about a topic for GL Features or static page that has some links to:
Better yet - a Doc Mgmt plugin to store these gems and allow it to be maintained.
Cheers,
Blaine
epretorious
- Learn About GL
- Getting Started with GL
- Intro to GL
- etc.
Sunnyvale, CA
Eric P.
Sunnyvale, CA
epretorious
Thanks for the excellent overview - This really brings everything into focus! I'm going to download GL tonight and - If I'm able to make it work - vow to contribute to GL's instruction set.
Eric P.
Sunnyvale, CA
Eric P.
Sunnyvale, CA
epretorious
Eric P.
Sunnyvale, CA
Eric P.
Sunnyvale, CA
squatty
In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?
dreamscape
anything.....is possible, come one man.
Like I said right now squatty is doing the best job over at squatty.com
obviously we'd like to keep it on the community site as well, that seems to make sense where it should go. We're working on expanding what Geeklog.sf.net does...
dreamscape
As far as that subject is concerned, Mlimburg is supposed to be working on full blown document management that should solve some of these issues. Hopefully when he gets this done we'll move it onto gl.sf.net for everyones use.
dreamscape
Good luck! We'd obviously like to see your site once it gets geeked (if possible), but yes please give us whatever feedback you can. Thanks.
epretorious
Eric P.
Sunnyvale, CA
Dirk
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