21st September, 2007
vs.hive
Friday, 11:58 am in CodeGirl
So a week or so ago – for no particular reason at all – I decided to update sk.ring, the ancient webring management script that I wrote about a zillion years ago. I got about halfway through it when I realised that all that I was really doing was ripping code out of sk.fan. Now, I’d had an idea once of combining the webring and fanlistings scripts into one big monster script that could handle both those kinds of sites, as well as cliques (remember those?), but in the end never got around to it.
Until now!
So was vs.hive born. Behold its mighty feature set!
- PHP/MySQL.
- Lightweight, easy installation and customisation.
- User and search-engine friendly URLs.
- HTML Strict.
- Can be used for webrings, fanlistings and cliques.
- Stat-block including total members, total queued and last approved members.
- Notification if no new members have been added recently.
- Users may log in to change their own details.
- Users may reset their passwords
- Fanlisting & Clique: Country list displays most-frequently-used countries first (i.e. it’s non-Anglocentric).
- Fanlisting: Option for users to hide email if a URL is provided.
- Fanlisting & Clique: Automatic code sorting and grouping.
- Webring: Auto-parse member ring code.
- Dynamically changing Codes and Memberlist depending on hive type.
- Admin notification on new member and user detail change.
- Fanlisting & Clique: Optional ‘question’ field.
- Optional comment field.
- Optional separate code and ‘main site’ URLs.
- Validiation for legitimate emails and URLs.
- Option to disable email notifications.
- Spam protection for emails on member list page.
- Optional JavaScript spam protection for forms.
- Fanlisting & Clique: Upload and delete image codes via the admin panel.
- Clique: Optional sort by country.
- Mass-mailing feature.
And all that in only 16 files and one MySQL table! Though technically there are actually only two ‘doing stuff’ files, neither of which exceeds 900 lines; if you can’t tell, I’m kinda proud of the neatness of most of the code (the code sort function is a bit shittacular).
I converted Uncreative and RADIO.BLOGS to vs.hive in ‘webring’ mode, and you can see a demo of the fanlisting mode here. The installs took me all of about five minutes, however I’m conscious that this is my own code so of course I’m going to find it easy to install. If anyone out there in reader land has an extra couple of minutes on day and feels like doing some UAT,1 it’d be most appreciated. The one thing I’m not 100% sure on is how easy the individual pages are to customise; I had to sacrifice a bit of flexibility in the name of light code. Plus I’m sure there are some major security flaws but, meh, whatever! That’s the best part about running scripts that no-one else does; security by obscurity.
- It’s not technically beta testing, since the code has been released… but functionally it’s the same deal. ^
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Comments
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Oooh looks awesome.
What’s automatic code sorting?
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Fluff, mostly. If you look at this page, it just means that (if you tell it to) it will sort your code graphics by size automagically.
Ironically that was pretty much the hardest bit of code to write in the entire thing. >_O (Well, not ‘hard’ exactly but algorithmically the most complex, because it’s traversing a directory listing and doing a manual sort on filename rather than pulling data pre-sorted out of a database.)
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Oh wow, I see. Sounds complicated! @_@
Can the script convert existing fanlisting data from other fanlisting scripts?
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Doesn’t do it natively ATM (got no need for it for myself), but if you give me a couple of hours and the schema you’re working from I can probably knock one up.
BellaBuffs, right? Flat files shouldn’t be too hard; Enth3 is the one that scares me. That code is whacked…
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I installed it...
I installed it here: http://dofollowhive.pcriot.com/
Have a look.Everything is working fine and is 100% understandable to configure. I also had zero problem migrating it from my home simulated server to my live server, and then again to this new server. It’s a charm. I even added rel=”dofollow” to the links ala..
”.”"”.” “.”rel=”.”"”.”dofollow”, $ etc. etc. etc.. fun.. simple.. straight forward.
It’s not a live project yet or anything. I am still dabbling with it. Very neat code by the way. I wish others were as considerate.
I did have a problem getting affiliates working, as well as, not being able to find news module (is there one?) but it all works great.
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Yup, I’ve seen you in my referrer log.
Very neat code by the way. I wish others were as considerate.
Thank you very much! I’ve actually been criticised for my ‘neat’ code because it uses PHP short tags (there’ve been rumours for, like, seven years that they’re going to be depreciated ‘soon’), so I’m glad someone out there justifies my inclusion of them.
I did have a problem getting affiliates working
Oh? What went wrong? Any suggestions on what can be improved?
not being able to find news module
Not yet, no; it’s a future project.
And for the record, my blog is the fastest place to get hold of me. Though my email address is provided in the vs.hive readme file.
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lol!
Even your comment is neat!
As far as affiliates, since it wont work and I’m out of caffeine I haven’t tried to crawl through and diagnose anything. When I installed it, it replied “Hey you stop it!”..just kidding, it said my affiliates folder wasn’t writable (which it very well was - I mean, duh). So I commented out the error line just to see what would happen and the forms all displayed gracefully (as usual) yet when I tried to add an affiliate, no love from the script. No biggie because everything else works. Frankly I don’t know what the affiliates script does anyhow, I was trying to find out. In the morning I’ll see if I can figure it out, but I’m php handicapped. My knowledge is limited to tweaking WP and PHPbb (ech!).
Wait until you see the theme I’m making for it… whoooeee (I’ll send you a copy)
btw: I messaged you on facebook lol (oops?!)
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it said my affiliates folder wasn’t writable (which it very well was - I mean, duh).
To be honest, I don’t recommend running Affiliates if your server isn’t running phpsuexec, which it sounds like yours isn’t. phpsuexec will remove the need for folders and files to be chmodded before they can be written to by scripts (which is generally considered to be unsafe), so if it’s running properley Affiliates should just… work out of the box. This is why I don’t give any chmod instructions in the readme.
All the module does is manage a list of link buttons for you; it’s mostly for people who run fanlistings, since having affiliates is a Big Deal in those circles.
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p.s.
I like your smilies
(edited: I just found the edit button…sorry
)