Geeklog Forums

Hey there. I don't know if this is an active forum, but here we go.

First off, in my continuing quest for a perfect CMS tool, I've installed and generally happy with Geeklog. I never knew it before, and I've been using pMachine Pro 2.4 (the final version before EE) and I have always liked pM -- even if it's a tad slow sometimes.

So...since no tool ever seems to suit all my desires, I set about trying to let the two systems share content. My approach was to use the Static Pages plug-in and to create those pages with pMachine tags. The reults are basically fine -- Geeklog is serving up pMachine blog pages...well, the _content_ of those pages.

The problem that I can not seem to solve is that the rendered content from the Static Page (which just contains a pMachine one-liner tag) will _not_ adopt my CSS. In fact, no matter where I place <link ...> tags for CSS -- I've tried putting them with the other CSS tag in the 'header.thtml' file, I've tried putting them in the static pages 'index.php' file, etc.

The content from my pMachine blogs, from my pM 'blocks', and from my pM member pages all comes out just fine ... and the style classes are there as expected. But the styles just will not render.

Is there some Geeklog 'switch' to throw? Is there something that I should learn to do regarding CSS and the Static Pages plug-in?

Geeklog 1.3.11sr1 is what I'm using. Geeklog certainly has caught my fancy, even though it's using HTML 4 and raw tables and mixes content and style like mad. I'm even okay with the fact that tiny pieces of obscure code are scattered all over...it's still pretty damned good for group/collaboration management in publishing (which is what I'm up to), and I'll sure keep using it. I read about GL2, but I'm still going to dive into 1.3x

Maybe I'll end up only using it for some tasks, and then try to link in to it from outside the Geeklog system (i.e., on the other pages of my site).

In case it matters, I elected to install GL into a sub-directory of my main site, so I am not directly in 'public_html', but rather I'm in a sub-dir named 'geeklogs', and that's where I roll from. My admin stuff is outside my 'public_html' directory entirely, so that's where the static pages plug-in resides (of course.

I'm pretty good at PHP, and I'm confident about my server and scripts and such, but I am a total "newbie" with this Geeklog system, so be gentle on me. I can edit and hack if needed, but finding the right files/templates/functions is very slow for me at present (it'll get better, I know.)

Okay, Geek-loggers. Let me know if you have suggestions or pointers for integrating CSS into these Static Pages.

Hey...as I wrap up it strikes me to ask if it might not make more sense for me to try to wrap Geeklog inside my pMachine instead of the other way around (like I'm doing now)? The reason I ask is because pMachine uses XHTML 1.0 Transitional, while GL uses HTML 4.0 Transitional, and so...is _that_ part of my problem? (I don't think it is in this case, because the full content of my Static Page is only one like, a pMachine PHP tag. There's nothing X/HTML involved in what I've entered.)

In general, I would probably want to serve XHTML, which might contain chunks of HTMTL 4, rather than the reverse, eh?

Okay, that should have been a different forum post in another topic, probably, but it seems related here as well.

Enough from me. What from you?

Thanks for the time, and thanks for turning me onto Geeklog!

I also found it a bit difficult to put the engine of my Toyota in a Volkswagen....I think it will be easier to make a pmachine like 'blog' plugin for Geeklog than fitting one system (and CSS) into another, it will be terrible to make it browser compatible.

Have you tried the External Pages plugin? That let's you wrap Geeklog around anothewr application. 15 Minutes work, and perhaps it works fine...but beware of cookie problems...

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Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

That's pretty good, beewee. You've got a point. On the other hand, it's really fun to see a Beetle doing 140! Seriously, however, I do hear you. I've given this a lot of thought, and I've done a lot of experimenting, and I think I've worked out the initial kinks.

Mainly, I want the permissions, and specificity of GeekLog and I want the multi-blog, multi-author capabilities of pMachine. Since I've already been using pM, and since all the tools are built around pMachine (our local desktop-to-web-publishing AppleScripts are all written for pMachine's bookmarklet, for instance), it makes a lot of sense for me (and maybe others) to find a way to use both tools, intertwined.



As I said in my initial post, while I'm quite comfortable with PHP and have been using pMachine for about 2 years, I am very new (one week) to GeekLog. I'm only just beginning to learn its template variables and would not feel comfortable attempting to build a plug-in. (But you're point is well taken, and speaks highly of GeekLog's ability to be customized via plug-ins, and so I do not dismiss what you say for the future...pMachine and GeekLog are quite complementary, in my opinion, and I hope my experiment turns out well.

But, despite my own initial wild guesses, I have been implementing the plan. Happily, and not all that surprisingly, I can report much success. The 'Static Pages' plug-in does the job it says on the wrapper, and the few fragmented pMachine tags needed to inject the database content are dealt with quite seemlessly.

And the CSS issue has been side-stepped (I don't know why the 'header.thtml' file won't load additional stylesheets, but I've combined them all into the primary 'style.css', and that's solved the problem for now.)



I was not aware of that plug-in and I will certainly go search for it now. In the interim, I'm finally at the stage where the pMachine contents is happily displayed in Left Block, Center Block or Right Block, and it is styled just as has been in the other (pM) sections of the site.

As I continue, I'm sure I'll experience issues that I am not anticipating, but maybe by then your suggestion of this other plug-in will have addressed those.

GeekLog sure is interesting to me, and I think it will do just what I envisioned when we started rethinking our collaborative approach to publishing.

Thanks for your humor and for your helpful pointers.

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the Accidental Techie