The Poll on the front page was added to get some current feedback on our site visitors as we have seen quite an increase in interest, downloads and site membership over the past year.

It was no surprise to see a large percentage of new users but the results to-date with over 350 votes indicates, there are over 40% still investigating. It's a major percentage of our daily/weekly visitors.

We have over 500 downloads daily and climbing. There have been over 650 downloads in the past 24hrs for example/ Thats just downloads from this site with 205 of them being the latest geeklog release. Our bandwidth used is approaching 1Gb/day.


I know some of the responses to this question but wanted to start this thread to get some feedback on this question.

What are the main things we should do different with this site or with Geeklog to make it more appealing or easier to make your decision

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

I just did my first geeklog install. www.sunkeypublications.com Funny because I have been using geeklog for almost 2 years.

Geeklog was installed on my non-profit site by someone who was learning how to use it himself. He volunteered his time and taught me a lot. The site is also a HUGE success. www.keystonesoldiers.com

I also have several sports sites and when the network owner saw the geeklog setup on my other site he was so impressed he started using it and converted our entire network to geeklog. SportsInfinity gets over 6M visitors per month. With the new draft site he installed he had 529,635 visitors in one week. www.nflfans.com/draft/ When you look at his site you will see it is heavily customized but it is still geeklog and the logo is still on every site in the network even though we are all independent publishers.

Sorry this is so long. What I am suggesting to answer your question is that you should have a block of successful, non-developer sites listed on your front page so those trying to decide have some examples of how geeklog can work for them.

Not everyone investigating is building a site for program developers but most of the info found here is by and for them. The server company I just got space from has all the items there to install phpWebsite and phpNuke and if I had not already known about geeklog I may have installed one of them.
I do plan to let the server company know how well the geeklog install went and ask them about adding it to the options built into the control panel.
The ease of instal and the rapid response I got to questions here was amazing. I thank all of those who answered my questions so quickly in the last 2 days. I will be using geeklog for several more sites I will be building for clients, including one I got last night who wants 6 websites built next month. He saw the one I did yesterday and called today.

Thank you!

After installing Geeklog i can definitly see it potential. It can have many more Features as well. Such as Maybe Commerce integration for esales. Im sure there is a way to do it just not right out of the box. Hmmm maybe a OSX installer as well packaged with MySQL would get more people to use it.
Don''t forget to make it turn on PHP for those client versions of X. Then we will see a big jump in downloads. Im even thinking of doing it myself. Hmmm only after i get the cookies to work right. Im not able to get cookies to work correctly yet. i.e. not able to log in. yet phpmyadmin works fine with cookies. ill ask this question in the FAQ later.
OS X 10.3.2
Dual G4 500mhz
1.5/384 dsl line.
hehehe

I've been one of those investigating Geeklog for some time mostly because I'm totally green at things to do with mySQL and php and things like that. Basically, I was looking for a webhost which would offer a preferably free installation of GL and help me configure it.

I have found a few hosts which are willing to help me out and for that, I'm glad. But, it would be most helpful if Geeklog.net could list webhosts that offer affordable prices with Geeklog installation.

I'll be installing my Geeklog soon prolly in less than a couple of weeks' time after 6 months of contemplation! But, i must add Geeklog is a fantastic idea! Thank you!

Hi,

I am looking at using a news system for my site.

I guess the main problem I have with downloading these programs is:

1) A lot of script sites do not have demonstrations/screenshots/sufficient 'jargon-free' documentation to show the flexibility and possibilities of said scripts.

Thanks.

You can test out Geeklog (and a lot of other scripts) without having to install it over at opensourcecms.com.

Setting up a Geeklog demo site is also on my to-do list (maybe once 1.3.9rc1 is finally out ...).

bye, Dirk

I'm considering putting together a site to "publish" some ultra-short video sketches that I'm currently planning. I'm a geek and a filmmaker who knows nothing about PHP or mySQL, but have a lot of programming experience. That said, I'm still on the fence mostly because all of the blog tools I've seen, geeklog included, seem mostly concerned with non-media-rich applications, of which my site won't qualify. I don't need much, but I'm wondering if I'll need more than Geeklog to get by.

I hope this note provides you guys with something useful.

Much love,

auteur0

I just downloaded and installed geeklog within the past week, and already made a lot of changes to suit my needs. For one, I wanted geeklog to auto detect whether I use http or https sessions and keep it that way for every access. Especially if I'm being an admin from an untrusted site (like work). Since I've limited my site to the Smooth_Blue theme I didn't bother changing any templates in other layouts.

Another case, even though geeklog recommends users don't add spaces to their names when they register, they still can. Later they can't access their account. So I had to write code to validate usernames and call it at appropriate times. I had to add additional error messages, but I only changed the english.php version.

Prior to geeklog I was using Moveable type. I didn't have very many stories, but there was no easy way to import my stories and comments into geeklog. Some automated import/export feature would be nice. Also bulk operations on stories or comments would be nice. Being able to edit someone else's comment, or disabling new comments but showing existing ones. The list goes on...

I've been keeping all my changes locally in CVS so I can merge future changes into my code, or to provide my changes back to interested parties. I've also integrated gallery and tried to keep up with some of the reported bugs. I would like to send my patches back to the developers. However I was so busy this week converting over I haven't had the chance to contact anybody yet.

I must say though I think geeklog has a lot of potential and the developers have done a great job to get it this far. Since I've already converted all my old stories and added new content this week I have committed to it. However, the site is private so I can't really share the URL. Sorry.

Hmm, can you explain that, please?

AFAICS, user names with spaces in them should work just fine (despite that note about not using spaces). I'm not aware of any problems with this.

bye, Dirk

I was looking at logs, and perhaps it was coincidence that the first user to mistype a password happened to also put a space in their username.

Nevertheless, I anticipate allowing special characters in usernames to cause my site problems (i.e, did they put one space or two!?), so I explicitly check for a valid username as defined by my site. This could be a hook in geeklog.

Thanks,
Drago

Our project site is down (see current featured story) so I can't check, but I think there's already a feature request or a bug report for that ...

bye, Dirk

I've been using GL for maybe close to a year and a half. So far I love it and it does most everything I need. I say most becuse there are still plugins that I am waiting for. ie osCommerace by DrShakagee. I dont' know if he is going to release that or not. Also I can't seem to get the Upage plugin to work all that well. And I ended up using a membership software that isn't intergrated with GL called aMember.

However the core Geeklog works flawlessly and overall I am very happy with it.

I think more than anything for theme developers, plugin developers and other modifications(Hacks), I would like to see everyone get on the same page. I admire those who have the ability to design a plugin and many people do and I even assisted in the design of zClassifieds. But it seems that every plugin installation is different with it's own problems. So maybe a tighter standard in that department.

If GL is going to remain Open Source, then I think a description of what files control what areas. For instance if I want to change how links are displayed then It should tell me what template to change. Most of my time is trying to figure out what template handles something. (more for theme design than anything I guess)

Something else you should address more is GL's ability to do XML, in both the RDF output and it's ability to dislplay RSS,RDF,XML Feeds. I think this is a huge plus and I also believe that you are going to see more and more things come out in the XML arena. I believe that is where the trend is going.

As mentioned in this thread, Geeklog 1.3.9 will let you implement your own feed formats. I'm also keeping an eye on the development of Atom, as that may (or may not) become the Next Big Thing.

However, some things in this area will have to wait until Geeklog 2, as the current architecture gets in the way on occasion ...

bye, Dirk

Your right and it looks like ATOM is based around XML.

I've been exploring the possibility of using GL or similar blog to replace a forum function on a site built on diverse interacting databases with the aim to be a knowledge base for a professional group. The focus of the forum must be to foster interactivity of that user community. Users must be able to start discussion topics and sign on or off receiving e-mail responses at a fairly fine level and the system must work easily for relatively computer naive users. I discovered that blogs tend to be too centrally controlled and I had given up on the idea of using a blog until I ran into GL while searching for PHP-based forums and then again in a MacWorld article. I like the Poll function a lot, the forum flexibility still seems a bit constrained (but that may be the examples I've found), and I have no idea how well it does with handling images. The gallery function is pretty weak in the sites I visited. I will definitely ask my webmaster to investigate GL more fully with me.
--jn

I love Geeklog. It's a great piece of software (even though it's PHP-based), and I'd recommend it for any personal blog/site. I usually prefer J2EE-based tools, but Geeklog is self-contained enough for me not to worry about using PHP.

I do wish I could figure out how to turn thecensorware off. Sometimes I just want to swear on my blog, and a piece of software should not prevent me from doing so.Joe

In Geeklog, you mean?

$_CONF['censormode'] = 0;

in config.php.

bye, Dirk

Hi

I came across an install of Geeklog on another site

and thought I would take a look. So far I like what I see, I am running it locally to get the 'feel' for it and apart from mySql dropping the db for some reason it has been a relatively painless excersise to install it (twice!) I am impressed with the features avaliable in the default installation and the documentation is good my only complaint here is that maybe you should include the full paths (I know it's mentioned at the top that everything resides in public_html but when you are reading installation instructions line by line it's easy to forget! maybe that's just me )
Anyway's I think you've got a winner here and I think you've solved my problem of what to 'do' with my website.
Cheers Guys & Gals
ZK-SHB

Hi,
some time ago i was testing severral's CMS system to manage my site and thinks that GL is a good point, the best quality, for me, is the speed of load :-D

but I thinks that need some features, like the pm function or the banners manager.

btw, any spanish people here?

my best
Vlad
www.kolgados.com.ar

SoLar - Software Libre Argentina

There is PM functionality in Blaine's Private Messenger Plugin. Check out PortalParts. As for banner rotation, some people have been using a phpAd integration. I don't remember the name, but see if you can find it using a search.