Re: [Phpslash-devel] Re: mailinglist status

[Joe S. <joe...@us...>]

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 01:27:14AM -0400, Luis M wrote:
> --- CC'ing -devel ----
> 
> >Hello,
> >
> >Do you have the mailinglist working for your site now with the
> >changes we made?
> >
> >If so, can you apply the appropriate changes to the -ft cvs?
> >
> >I'd like to get a RC release going soon.
> 
> Yes. The mailing list has been working for some time in my "production" site 
> with no hiccups. I'll be doing the diff'ing and applying changes to -ft very 
> soon.
> 
> There are couple of things we need to keep in mind for 0.7.2 before 
> considering RC's:
> 
> 1. getTitleBar doesn't have a STORY_ID variable (container). Before I had 
> titles that when you click on then get you to the story ( a la "MORE" link). 
> For some reason, after upgrading one of my production sites to 0.7.1 I lost 
> this functionality. I'm not sure if it has to do with phplib or that's the 
> way things were in previous versions of phpslash and we somehow changed this 
> for the 0.7.1 release... What I mean is that STORY_ID was declared somewhere 
> and as te templates for slashhead() were parse, somehow that container was 
> still active when getTitleBar() got called... In short, having this variable 
> available for titles don't hurt. We would love to let people click on MORE 
> or the TITLE of the story to go to the whole article ... it's just natural.
> 

Not sure how you handled this before.  What I've done is replace the 
{TITLEBAR} with {TITLE} like:

<a href="{ROOTDIR}/article.php3?story_id={STORY_ID}">{TITLE}</a>

This is in story.tpl or storyIndex.tpl.

I usually also pretty much replace the {THESTORY} tag in 
storyIndex.tpl with most of the stuff in story.tpl.  I believe a few 
of the skins in the -skins cvs do this.  In this way, the index page 
can look different than just the first part of the article page.  
Just because the original slashdot page does this doesn't mean your 
layout needs to.

> 2. there should be a way to declare arrays/containers/hashes directly from 
> the config.ini.php file (or somewhere else) so that the user can just do 
> things in that file (or maybe thru the "admin" links right into the 
> database) and don't need to modify the slashhead() calls to get variables 
> declared at the slashhead(). For instance, prior to 0.7.1, I had to do 
> things like:
> 
> $banner=random_image("file.txt");
> slashHead(...,...,"",$banner);
> 
> This means that I had to modify the functions.inc and e/a slashHead() call 
> for e/a script/page I wanted to show a random banner chosen from a file... 
> painfull to maintain and upgrade!
> 
> Thanks goodness that you changed slashHead() to get an $extra_ary hash for 
> which keys will be taken as containers for the templates, now I can just do:
> 
> $banner["RANDOM_IMAGE"]=random_image("file.txt");
> slashHead(...,...,$banner);
> 
> And things work as expected. You are a genius :-D This functionality should 
> be added to the manual for other webmasters out there who use phpslash for 
> their customers ;-) People love to have banners and other "commercials" in 
> their sites.
> 

gotcha.  The guts are there, but each page has to be modified to 
call the header correctly.

I had been thinking that this would be spread out for different ad 
"zones".  

How about this?

$extra_ary = '';
// Are there extra tags/variables to pass to slashHead.tpl?
if(is_array($_PSL['extra_ary'])) {
   $extra_ary = $_PSL['extra_ary'];
}

$header = getHeader($pagetitle,$_PSL['metatags'], $extra_ary);

Then it could be defined in config.ini, config.php, or in the 
script.  But couldn't come from the url.


> 3. We should stress the poll (system: classes, functions, pages, admin 
> pages) to make sure that we took care of all "known" bugs. I'll be doing 
> this ASAP and I'll let you know if I find something that needs to be 
> changed.
> 

I don't think there is anything here to hold us up, but we'll see.

Joe

> I think that's it for now. If I remember other things I'll let you know as I 
> find them.
> 
> ----)(-----
> Luis Mondesi
> System Administrator
> LatinoMixed.com
> 
> le...@ho...
> 
> "...The Mac does this so smoothly, it feels like an extension of your mind." 
> - Paula Speer, MacWorld Magazine 2003-04
> 
> Public signature: http://www.latinomixed.com/lems1/public-a.asc
>