notes

There's some stuff you might want to mess around with, particularly in the "inc" folder..

.htaccess
Actually, there isn't one of these in the inc/ folder at all, but there is in the main folder, and other folder too. The main one sets up the character encoding for the whole blog/ folder and directs the server to parse .blog files as html, and the others generally prevent direct web access to your data, arc/ folder and such.

if you want to know more about .htaccess files, go here.
note: many operating systems will hide files beginning with a dot

themes
This is where your styles live. In the top-level are default (required) styles for the admin page, scheme editor and spelling demo/checker. There are also folders. Each folder is a "theme", and the name of the folder is the name of the theme, e.g. "example". Inside each theme folder is a stylesheet and ini file. These must match the name of the theme, e.g. "example.css" and "example.ini". The default is original.css

The CSS file contains all the layout and style programming for the theme. The ini file contains all the values that will be inserted into the CSS at run-time.

The theme's ini file can contain any number of "schemes", which are named sets of values (e.g. "blues"), with all the color values, image locations, sizes that can be applied to the theme. These are editable either from the scheme editor GUI or with a regular text editor, whichever you prefer.

The entire theme is completely customizable. Feel free to make your own.

scheme-edit.php
Cool color scheme chooser/editor. Regular users accessing this file get a simple scheme choice (this choice is stored in a cookie in the user's browser so when they re-visit your blog, they get their old scheme back). Once logged in, the page transforms into a groovy scheme editor with live color picker, dynamic, intuitive color inputs and more. You can edit, copy, delete and save schemes, alter all the elements as well as create new ones (for instant availability in your CSS!). En-Joy!

NOTE: Whatever scheme you load into the scheme editor becomes your default scheme for viewing the entire blog. And there's your preview feature right there! This only affects you, of course. When you hit reset/logout, your view will revert to the default (either the site default, or whatever overriding scheme preference you have set in your cookie)

The themes have a few nifty features you may want to know about. Firstly, everything is dynamic. As soon as you create a preference, e.g. nice_text=" purple" (or with the "add new preference" button in the scheme editor), that value is immediately available for use in your style sheet as a dynamic token, and you can use it in your style sheet like so: color: %%nice_text%%

corzblog comes with an automatic image pre-loader. This is generated at the foot of your pages and ensure any roll-over images will be immediately available to the browser/user. You can have your own images automatically added to the pre-loader by simply using the word "hover" in the image file name, e.g. "blues-edit_hover.png".

On the subject of automatic-ing images, you can use either relative or absolute paths in your image prefs. For images that live inside your theme's "images" folder, simply use "images/my-image.png", and corzblog will generate full path automatically. If you set some site image via a absolute path (beginning with a forward slash, e.g. "/images/my-image.png"), corzblog will leave the path alone.


The bbcode to html to bbcode parser. You can use this on its own for other projects

cbguide.php
The bbcode guide. This gets re-used so much I separated it out.

footer.php
You can leave that as it is, incorporate my logo into something else, or trash it. so long as you leave a link somewhere, it's your call.

js/
JavaScript functions for the quick-code buttons live in here. If you add something real groovy, let me know. This is also where to find the JavaScript for the scheme editor's color-picker.

spelling/
Your word lists live in here. You can add words to these from directly inside the corzblog editor or self-contained spell-checking demo (if authorized). The top-level contains generic word lists for spell-checking, and the user/ folder contains your own personal word lists.

pajamas/
Pajamas security. This keeps your blog secure. It can also be used as a plug-in site-wide login mechanism - once logged in to one pajamas web app, you are logged into them all, or not, depending on how you configure it. Pajamas encrypts your passwords before sending them over the wire.

metadata.php
This is inserted at the top of every page, stuff that browsers like to know. You will probably want to edit this. I also chucked the starter for the page generation timer in here, handy.


note: character encoding metadata is hard coded into the pages themselves, reason being, when the webserver finds that data, it reloads the page from scratch with the specified encoding.

It makes sense then, not to go including pages before this process happens. Although utf-8 is specified in the master .htaccess file for corzblog, some webservers ignore this. As they say, your mileage may vary …



spelling.php
The corzblog spell-checker. Quite good, actually.


pajamas
This directory houses the login security system.




Archiving your blogz


At the end of each month/quarter, you'll probably want to archive your blog. Not only will this save you bandwidth and quicken downloads of your blog (say 100k per month, per page, per page view .. think about it), but keeps everything nice and organised. This is ridiculously easy to achieve:

  • click the edit blogs link in the sidebar.
  • You'll figure out the rest.

Remember that the name you choose for your archive will appear in the sidebar, so don't make it too long. I may add a check for this. As a guide; the blogs menu truncates the individual blog names to 18 characters. I'm using "nov" type names, see left (the year part is inserted automatically).


bugs:

no known "bugs", but a few foibles!

For example, currently, your smiley folder location is inside cbparser.php. In future versions, this will be rolled into the main preferences, but meantime, if your smileys don't show, you know where to look!


to do:

There are still preferences that need to go into the ini file/config tabs
Make a few more themes


That's it! Get blogging!

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

ps.. This software is free for personal, non-profit use, so long as you leave a link to my site, especially the "powered by" logo in the footer, and perhaps a link to the corzblog source. Thanks very much. Please do read the enclosed license, you may be surprised.

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