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<h1 align="center">openFIRST Manual</h1>
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      <td height="1579"> <p>Welcome to the openFIRST Portal System manual. Due 
          to time constraints this manual is not totally complete and lacks some 
          minor information. We plan to release a more complete and advanced system 
          as we have more time. Here are some helpful articles:</p>
        <p><strong>How To Setup openFIRST</strong></p>
        <p>openFIRST as of this version has 14 complete modules. At the bottom 
          of this page you will see a complete list of the modules and links to 
          their manual references. The openFIRST system has many complex functions 
          and is completely intergrated for allowing ease of use for webmasters.</p>
        <p>openFIRST was originally developed by Tim Ginn (PortPerry Robotics) 
          and David Di Biase (ArchAngel Robotic), senior FIRST students competing 
          in the FIRST Canadian Regional. The intent of openFIRST was originally 
          to allow teams and webmasters a foundation for a website allowing them 
          to focus on design and content. Most students are not fluent in web 
          code so we hope that openFIRST will provide them with atleast some knowledge 
          in setting up a website.</p>
        <p>The first step to setting up openFIRST is downloading and arranging 
          the files according. For Unix users there a very nifty module called 
          bashinstall written by Tim that automatically retrieves and arranges 
          the files. Unfortunately there is no equivelent for our Windows users, 
          therefor we will have to do it the older fashioned way.</p>
        <p>Visit http://www.openfirst.org click on downloads and downloads the 
          latest full module package you can. Once you have the file downloaded 
          you should notice that within the zip there are 14 other zips.Unpackage 
          this zips to a folder on your computer. Lets prepare your webserver 
          now that you have the files ready to be arranged. Currently openFIRST 
          supports most webservers that support PHP. We have tested the system 
          with the following configurations:</p>
        <li>mysql-IIS/Windows</li>
        <li>mysql-Apache/Windows</li>
        <li>mysql-Apache/Linux</li>
        <li>mssql-Apache/Windows</li>
        <li>mssql-IIS/Windows</li>
        <li>odbc-IIS/Windows</li>
        <li>odbc-Apache/Windows</li>
        <li>odbc-IIS/Windows</li>
        <li>odbc-Apache/Linux</li>
        <p>So make sure that you have one of the following configurations. Once 
          you have them setup properly make sure you have a database already setup. 
          Prepare your username and password for you will have to enter them into 
          the openFIRST install shield.</p>
        <p>Now open the directory in which you want openfirst to run under. If 
          you wish to run openFIRST as your root website export the files into 
          the root directory of your server. For IIS users this most commonly 
          be located at (c:\inetpub\wwwroot\). Now open the base zip file and 
          export its contents into the web root. Once that has completed exporting 
          begin unzipping all the other modules zips into the same root directory. 
          Before we use the FIRST install shield to do the rest of the work you 
          have to make sure that read/write permissions on /config/globals.php 
          are to allow.</p>
        <p>Now that the basic file structure is setup we can run the FIRST install 
          shield. In your browser enter the address to the openFIRST root file. 
          If you are running this on a local system you can use (http://localhost 
          or 127.0.0.1) to access your webserver files. Now you want to open /config/index.php 
          which should automatically direct you to the install shield.</p>
        <p>At this point you will be able to use our system GUI to setup the system. 
          Please be very careful when entering file locations and connecting files 
          to the openFIRST system. If you conect the files incorrectly you should 
          receive an entire slew of errors. If so...too bad :-p you will have 
          refresh first.php and try again. The reason why you set write permissions 
          to the global.php file was because first.php, when the form is submitted, 
          automatically creates the globals.php script for you. <em>To make sure 
          there are no security holes make sure you remove the write permissions 
          to global.php</em>. We are not responsible for any damaged websites 
          if this security hole is not closed. </p>
        <p>Now you will have to actually install the modules you wish to use. 
          Click Install Components. Select the modules which you would like to 
          run on the openFIRST system. Note that you dont have to use all the 
          modules that come with openFIRST. There are many people who would just 
          like to use our modules for specific components. For more information 
          on how to do this read the How To Use Components section of the manual.</p>
        <p>Once you have the modules installed you have to active them and decide 
          if you want them shown on the menu. Click module administration. A list 
          of all the currently isntalled modules will be shown. Click on the checkboxes 
          that correspond to each module. The includes file texbox is used to 
          edit the includes that each module are required to use. We added this 
          feature to give webmasters more control over which functions to be included 
          into the system. The files you list in the includes textbox will be 
          found in the directory of the module. For example the logger module 
          has an include file called logger.php. This file may be found iat/logger/logger.php.</p>
        <p>The Configuration Area also has another nifty feature. It has an openFIRST 
          version check system which automatically scans the version numbers of 
          your module scripts and lets you know if there are any new versions 
          that you can download.</p>
        <p>Congratulations, you have just installed openFIRST, the first open-source 
          robotics driven website for teams and students of the FIRST Robotics 
          Competition.</p>
        <p><strong>How To Use Components</strong></p>
        <p>So you like a few openFIRST modules but you dont want to HAVE to use 
          the entire system. We are perfectly fine with this; in fact we have 
          developed openFIRST to enocourage this. In order to use just a few modules 
          all you have to do is download the base module, pop it into your website 
          root and run the install shield. You can use headers and footers directly 
          from your website or you can modify our headers and footers directly.</p>
        <p>You can even use your original website database. All you have to do 
          is use the same connection information. We made sure that openfirst 
          tables wouldnt interfere with your websites table so we named each of 
          our tables with a prefix of ofirst_.</p>
        <p>Its that easy. Just download and install the modules you want and viola!</p>
        <p><strong>How To Customize openFIRST</strong></p>
        <p>openFIRST was designed to allow the manipulation and/or addition to 
          the system. We enourage anyone who is fluent in PHP to help develop 
          and expand the openFIRST portal system. If a developer comes up with 
          a quality module the openFIRST team will take the module into consideration 
          and adopt it as a certified module.</p>
        <p>Now you may have noticed that the portal system asks you for links 
          to a header and footer. What we suggest is that webmasters take our 
          headers and edit them to their own specifications, in this case you 
          wont have to make extra code for displaying information such as header 
          links. If you already have a website then you could adapt your header 
          and footer files to work seemlesly with the openFIRST system. The headers 
          and footers you specify are adapted everywhere on the system, even in 
          the e-mail outputs.</p>
        <p>Our team has adopted CSS in the headers because we wanted to give our 
          users more power in the design and look of the website. You will have 
          to code the CSS to our specifications but atleast you will be able to 
          control colors, backgrounds etc.</p>
        <p><strong>Behind The HTML</strong></p>
        <p>There is more to this system then just the fancy HTML and front-ends. 
          openFIRST has a pretty complex internal structure. The entire system 
          works off relative path linking to make reference to scripts easy. The 
          most important foundation of the system is the config file, obviously. 
          Config contains all the main files for installation, headers, footers, 
          global files, and functions. The functions folder contains files which 
          are automatically included into the globals. When globals is first called 
          the system scans the folder and includes the functions. Functions in 
          this folder are usually vital to the overall system. Although if you 
          would like you may remove the file with the function you wish to disable. 
          The great thing about this is that even though you remove the function 
          files the system has a fall-back function. For example the openFIRST 
          WYSIWYG feature is used to replace almost every text box on the site. 
          If you were to remove this function the WYSIWYG box would automatically 
          revert to using a normal text box. Nifty huh :-).</p>
        <p>Each module uses relative paths to configure the modules which means 
          that you HAVE to have the module folders in the systems base root. This 
          is because when globals runs it depending on the include value from 
          the ofirst_config it will automatically include module specific include 
          files from each folder. For example logger has an include that is carried 
          throughout the website the help log visitors. When globals is called 
          it automatically gets the logger include files from the databaes and 
          includes /logger/logger.php. It was programmed this way so that users 
          will have more power over increasing the systems features and power.</p>
        <p><strong>Module Specific Information</strong></p>
        <li><a href="openfirst.base/openfirst.base.html">openFIRST.base</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.messenger/openfirst.messenger.html">openFIRST.messenger</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.members/openfirst.members.html">openFIRST.members</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.awards/openfirst.awards.html">openFIRST.awards</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.projects/openfirst.projects.html">openFIRST.projects</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.guestbook/openfirst.guestbook.html">openFIRST.guestbook</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.logger/openfirst.logger.html">openFIRST.logger</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.feedback/openfirst.feedback.html">openFIRST.feedback</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.news/openfirst.news.html">openFIRST.news</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.photogallery/openfirst.photogallery.html">openFIRST.photogallery</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.search/openfirst.search.html">openFIRST.search</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.sidebars/openfirst.sidebars.html">openFIRST.sidebars</a></li>
        <li><a href="openfirst.emoticon/openfirst.emoticon.html">openFIRST.emoticon&nbsp;</a></li>
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