Things are moving and shaking at my site though you can’t see any changes :p I’ve been installing/experimenting with a lot of stuff and I intend to add a quite a bit of new functionality to the site. Unfortunately, all of these new things will mean that I have a new entry page or at least redesign the current main page since it’s getting way too crowded with all those links in the sidebar 🙂 I’m not sure how I am going to go about it but for the moment, I am not too worried about that since I am still in the throes of installing and customizing stuff.
Yesterday I worked with QBoard. Now I know that QBoard is usually a remote server-based tagboard solution but they have also open sourced it and called it Free QBoard. When I first downloaded it and read the installation instructions, it said something along the lines of “use a shell account and run the install.sh file” and I was daunted since I did not have shell access. Yesterday however, I decided to go through the actual install.sh file and see what it had and was able to duplicate all the steps without any shell access. I installed it but it wouldn’t work since there were database names hardcoded in the code and I was not using the default database :p So then I introduced a configuration file to the system and removed all the database name, host, user and password stuff from the code and made it always use the config file settings. I then discovered that even though the system was supposed to be free, it still used the general interface from the original site and still had an ad banner at the top, so I removed that too :p It now works fine and anybody can get their own free QBoard from my site (though I don’t think I’ll be offering that service generally … at least not yet :p) but I am now consumed by the desire to do further PHP/mySQL hacking <g>
Since the source for QBoard has not been worked on at all since it was released (at least as far as I can tell by looking at the SourceForge site) I was thinking of contacting the developers and submitting the changes I’d already made and to further customize the code so that no shell access is necessary at all. Currently the shell access is needed to replace hard coded paths with your own paths and this could easily be handled by the config file – I’ll just have to wade through about twenty files and replace hundreds of occurrences of the path with the variable representing it. I think I would like to do that since that would get me into a new area of development since I haven’t done much PHP but that would also mean another detour for me – why oh why can’t I just continue on one path of development? :p
auto-login to phpbb is not working