Geeklog Forums

I've been playing with geeklog 1.3.11sr1 for several days and I think it;s one of the best one in the market. however, i have some comments about geeklog, and i hope that they will be fixed/added to geeklog2.

- encoding selection problem (iso8859? utf8? big5?). right now i've to add a function in lib-custom.php to force all pages to be utf8. will it be done in the admin home in the next version?

-for the login page, I think it'll be better to store the login attemps or the refer page, and hence, show different messages to the users. right now, users will only see "You may have mistyped your login credentials...." no matter the username/password given was incorrent or, being redirected from other page, say Contribute--> login

- there is no such option to forbid anonymous users to enter a section like news and geeklog, although it can be done per story (am i correct?)

- perhaps it will be a good idea to let administrators to add/remove the top menu somewhere inside the admin home since not all users or admin (in fact, they should be able to do so) are capable to modify the php codes

- i was wondering why i could not post story b4..... all I got was the message "You are trying to access a story that you don't have rights to....." and finally, i found that, it's because i had not enter something in the intro box. i guess it is a wrong message, rite?

- will the phpbb be integrated in the next version? I guess many of u'll love this since phpbb is a hot product. anyway, i would like to see if someone can write a plugin to search in both the geeklog's database and the forum's. it's a shame that my php programing is not good enough to handle the linkage between the two.... else, i'll be happy to code one

PS i havent try out geeklog2 yet, if it already solved the above problems, then pls ignore this post.

thx

Did you change the character set in config.php to utf-8? That's all I did and my sites are utf-8 and I haven't run into any problem so far.


Good suggestion.


You can set the permission to the Topic if you don't want anonymous user to see the entire topic. And yes, you can also set permissions to individual story. Is this what you are looking for?


For none php admin, s/he can use hardcoding in the header.thml. However, your suggestion is a very useful one.

There are a couple of other choices that can allow you to manage menu online. One is the Menu Plugin, and the other is Blaine's GLMenu plugin, at portalparts.com.


I tested posting a message without the intro text, I got this error, "Please fill in the Title and Intro Text fields". Your error must be in a different situation. Could you try again to find out how you got there? It can help improve GL's usability.


I guess, the short answer is no. One of the principle of GL development is to keep the core program as lean as possible. So all extras will be 'plugins', instead of intergration to the core. phpBB can be bridged. As you like phpBB, there are many other requests in favor of other BB systems. So, it is better left as plugins or bridged to meet different needs.

Geeklog2 has a long way to go. I have been with GL for three years and, if I remember it right, GL2 project has been there since then. So I don't think you will see GL2 within another year.

Sam

You also might want to check out the CVS versions. CVS is in constant update with new changes and fixes.

yes, but that's not the only thing i'd changed. I've also added an extra function to print out the html meta tag in lib-custom.php

follow up: oh... it;s my fault.... i didnt set it in my prefernce.... sorry about that



no. what i want to do is to block anonymous to enter a section, say under the top menu. currently, i've to add extra userid check in each php file/section. one more example, if i want to hide the search section on the top left, i've to add so many codes into several php files




ic, thx




try this, 100% work:
login as admin -> contribute -> enter somthing under title and body text and nothing else -> save -> click on edit on the result page -> wrong error message
i think it's due to the so-called "saved" story was not saved actully due to incomplete fileds/data. however, the system still let u edit it after posting the story(1st error). as a result, geeklog will not be able to retrieve that "saved" story (2nd error), and produce an error msg (3rd error)


furthermore, i have some more findings:

1/. the current mechanism for producing a page with default layouts/blocks is not very good, and sometimes troublesome. eg I've downloaded a plugin and started to play with it. i found that the plugin could not produce the layout in the proper way. all it did was a default html page (with gray background & normal text). after investigation, i found that it's the layout functions calling problem (without header, or missing arguments, etc). so, i would like to suggest an easier way to produce a layout with several function calls only like layoutWithDefaultBlocks($x), layoutWithLeftBlocksOnly($x), etc. and within these functions, all other things will be implemented automatically, including COMxxheader, COMxxxfooter, with the supply of $x - the text required to insert into the layout/template. so the users wont have to deal with too many things when they want to write plugins or create an output page.

2/. the plugin mechanism is another weakness. sometimes a new folder is required under public_html and root, while sometime just require one under root. i know that there are security issues if everything is put under the public_html folder, but, there must be an easier way to deal with the installation of plugins since right now everything requires manual operations. so if, if the plugin creator missed out something, it will be hard for the users to trace where the problem area is. for instance, to centralize the plugin's installation process, to let the plugin creators to submit a file list to let geeklog to handle the files/folder, etc might help

3/. i think it would be nice if geeklog let users to arrange the center blocks' position like phpxuke does.

i;m so sorry to post so much suggestions/bugs/complains here, but i really want geeklog to be a very successful one in the future. i just want to speak out my opinions, aiming at helping the geeklogers

Why? Geeklog is quite capable of sending the correct character set. The Professional theme sends it as a HTTP header (which is preferable over a meta tag anyway). Or, if you insist on a meta tag, just stick it in header.thtml and use the {charset} variable. Geeklog will replace that with the current character set from the user's language file.



Use {allowed_menu_elements} instead of {menu_elements} in your theme's header.thtml. I assume you know about the login settings?

bye, Dirk

yes, Dirk... it's my fault for not setting the default charset under my preference




ic, thx. i'll take a look at that.

Sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

To wrap your own content in Geeklog's framework (header, footer, side blocks), you need 3 lines of PHP code (5 if your content should be in a center block).

Which plugin was that?

bye, Dirk

that's exactly what i want to say. the '3 lines of codes' can be done in 1 single function call like:
createLeftBlockLayout($contents, $x, $y)
or, with more options:
createLeftBlockLayoutWithNoTextWrap($contents, $x, $y)

ie, users only require to pass the contents ($contents), or others if any ($x, $y). while more options are required, use another function (just like overriding a function)


btw, i forgot to login b4 replying, and the error msg was.... again, a misleading one

The 3 lines of code are
How would you make this any simpler?

bye, Dirk

well, i can see some plugins are passing different parameters to COM_siteHeader and COM_siteFooter(). and one of the plugins that couldnt produce the correct layout with left blocks, etc seems missed out something in the function call (assuming that he aimed to have the left blocks). below is an abstract:
.
.
.
COM_endBlock();
COM_siteFooter(true);

and i have changed to:
COM_siteHeader('menu');
COM_startBlock(xxxxx);
.
.
.
COM_endBlock();
COM_siteFooter(true);

so, i would like to suggest to add some standard functions in lib-common.php, eg

// generate default layout with left and right block
generateDefaultPageLayout($contents, $header)
{
COM_siteHeader();
// add left and right blocks
// write contents here
COM_siteFooter();
}

// generate default layout with left block only
generateLeftBlockOnlyPageLayout($contents, $header)
{
COM_siteHeader();
// add left blocks
// write contents here
COM_siteFooter();
}

to conclude, I think it will be better to let the developer to handle as few coding as possible since most of the default/duplicated codings can be done centrally. while COM_siteHeader and COM_siteFooter are a must, developers can forget these 2 function calls if they are handled by the system by default

u see what i mean now?
sorry for my poor english

Sorry, but if a plugin author can't even get these 3 simple lines of code correctly, then they shouldn't be writing code in the first place ...

I left out the parameters for COM_siteHeader and COM_siteFooter for brevity. As I posted it above, it would display the site's header, footer, and left blocks which is what most pages use anyway (with the exception of the index page). As I said: Can't get any simpler than that.

bye, Dirk

ic. ok