phpWebSite

The development team at Appalachian State University has released version 0.9.3-4 of phpWebsite.

Version 0.9.3-4 contains mostly bug fixes which were found in the 0.9.3-3 release, but there are some new features/enhancements.

Form Generator

• ability to send emails as text/plain instead of text/html
• ability to view, delete exports and archives

Notes

• send notes to groups of users or to all users on the site

Control Panel

• modules now list by label in alphabetical order

Other:

• improved output all around for XML/XHTML compliance
• spell checker added to the wysiwyg for those with the pspell extentsion loaded
• files written to the system in most modules have better permissions set for easier access

Download the full version.

Download the core-only version.

Remember to read the docs and go to /setup/ when upgrading your installation.

Enjoy!

I finally researched the last problem preventing me from having a clean XHTML validation of my website. PHP tags a session ID on some links. It appears on:

1. “Read More” and “Comments” links in Announcements
2. Generally all links created by Article Manager
3. Links in the Login box
4. Links in the Calendar

Another way to look at it is that all links except those that are hard coded or are in the Navigation menu have session id’s. I tried a couple of ways to turn off session id but they did not seem to work. I was finally able to turn it off in a php.ini in my root directory but it caused the core.php to generate errors. Hmm…what a pain in the butt!

my phpWebSiteHacks

It bugged me since I installed phpWebSite that it did not pass the 508 validators such as Bobby. They would flag the username and password box as not having an explicit label. To use an explicit label you have to find the code that dynamically creates the form input statement and modify it to include a “id=” parameter. Once the input statement includes the “id=” parameter you can add a label statement with a “for=” parameter that links to the input statement in the template, loginBox.tpl. Finding the code to change took some work although once I started using Jedit’s Hypersearch the job went faster. Some of the form input statements used by phpWebSite are created in EZelement.php and some are created in Form.php. I changed them in both places since I found the EZelement code first. The input statements for the login and password are in the formTextField and formPassword functions in Form.php. I set the id field to the same value as the $name. Then I changed the loginBox.tpl template in the mod-Users-templates-forms directory to add the two label statements referencing the id fields. Now Bobby says I am cool.

When I installed the Mailto module, it did not work. For some unknown reason I ended up at the Create Event screen when I tried to add a mailing address. After some debugging I finally figured out a fix that works for me. I suspect it will work without problems for everyone. The mailto module allows people to send email to you without having to post an email address on the website. Although sometimes I think I am already on all of spam mailing lists I still would like to avoid any more increases in spam from automated webcrawlers. The fix was simple. It appears that two templates had an error in it. The generated html did not have a at the end of two different forms in edit.tpl and mail.tpl. I made a SWAG that two templates needed a to generate the proper code. It worked and I am happy even though I do not know why the default theme worked. My customized themes would bring up a Create Event form. I posted my fix on sourceforge so hopefully others can check it out.

For a couple of weeks I have been trying to chase down some validation errors with my phpWebSite installations. The way I think is that testing for valid code is easy and probably saves you time in the long run. I have used IE favlets in the past but my current favorite web development platform is the Web Developer add-in for Firefox.

PhpWebSite is advertised as producing valid xhtml and accessible code so this should have been a no brainer. Well, I ran it through the W3C html validator and it comes up with errors on the announcements. It tacks on an extra field when it is read by w3c which somehow gets stripped out when you view the source in your browser. I did not find the problem on phpWebSite project page so maybe the cleared up this problem in 9-3.3.

The accessibility errors are simple but hard to find. Bobby requires an explicit label for a form fields. I was able to add an implicit label but that satisifies the 508 validator used by Cynthia. To use an explicit label I need the input statement to use an “id=” parameter. The input statement appears to be generated dynamically.

The RSS validator cannot seem to find the RSS output. It fails with a 404 error code which means that it could not find the file. I can see the output in my RSS aggregator so I am confused.

Yesterday I tried a few third party modules for phpWebsite. Some of them worked but did not fit what I wanted to do and some just did not work(i.e. showinmain). One of them worked but only for the default theme(mailto). The symptom was that I could not add a mailing address and I could not send mail. For some unknown reason I ended up at the Create Event screen when I tried to add a mailing address. After some debugging I finally figured out a fix that works for me. I suspect it will work without problems for everyone. The mailto module allows people to send email to you without having to post an email address on the website. Although sometimes I think I am already on all of spam mailing lists I still would like to avoid any more increases in spam from automated webcrawlers. The fix was simple. It appears that two templates had an error in it. The generated html did not have a </form> at the end of two different forms in edit.tpl and mail.tpl. I made a SWAG that two templates needed a {END_FORM} to generate the proper code. It worked and I am happy even though I do not know why the default theme worked. My customized themes would bring up a Create Event form. I posted my fix on sourceforge so hopefully others can check it out.

I bit the bullet last week and set up a host with godaddy. The price and features looked good and I had been pleased with godaddy’s service. Then I tried to install phpwebsite. I could not get it to install and naturally they were of no help. I searched the web and did not find any help so I started to debug the php code. It took me awhile but I finally narrowed the problem down to the set_ini statement that godaddy had disabled for security reasons. The set_ini function is used by phpwebsite to modify the include path so that PHP can find the Pear library. After a few more emails to see if they would either modify the settings for my host to allow me to use set_ini or install the Pear library as a system library, I gave up and started searching for a new host provider. There were several “independent” reviews available out on the web so I scanned the lists and several of the top rated sites. I sent off a few emails to the sales departments inquiring about their PHP settings but ended up narrowing my list down to those top-rated sites that supplied the Fantastico application installer. Fantastico is an amazing CPanel/PHP based Web application that integrates with CPanel and allows clients like me the ability to automagically install a variety of Open Source Applications including phpwebsite and wordpress. So I called bluehost.com and they encouraged me to try it out since there was a money back guarantee. Within about ten minutes I had created a website, installed both phpwebsite and wordpress, and completed my initial testing. Now that is slick! On top of that the CPanel application provides a slew of nice features such as ssh/script access and secure browser based file transfers. They did not skimp on hosting features either. You get 1GB of diskspace, 10 databases, perl/php, and slew of other features. This all comes at a very competitive price of $6.95 a month. Wow! I am impressed. I knew deep down that setting up a web site is not that hard. The hard part is selecting the right host provider. Click here to checkout or signup for bluehost.com.