“Blogger - Community Blogging Platform” Documentation by “OmyAlpha”


“Blogger - Community Blogging Platform”

Created: 16th of December 2013
By: Omar Digna (OmyAlpha)
Email: [email protected]

First off, Let me take the time to thank you for choosing Blogger, and I hope you'll find it useful, for support and more information, please visit my Codecanyon profile. Thanks!


Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Installation
  3. Blog Admin Panel
  4. Miscellaneous
  5. Sources and Credits

A) Introduction - top

Blogger is a script dedicated to create a blogging platform for communities. Once installed, Blogger allows site visitors to create a private blog which gets automtically added to other blogs to form a community of bloggers


B) Intallation - top

Blogger is fairly easy to install, simply follow the following steps:

- Unpack your downloaded zip file to your computer

- Edit "config.php" in "php" directory with your database settings and website top-level-domain "exmaple.com"

- Edit ".htaccess" file, enter your top-level-domain "example.com" where specified

- Edit "entries.php", "admin/index.php", "admin/header.php", "admin/register.php" entering your domain name in line 3 - note: please leave the dot "." preceding the domain name ".example.com"

- Upload the folder content to your server

- Rename "htaccess.txt" to ".htaccess"

- Run 'install.php' on your server

- Create wildcard subdomain, required only for subdomain version support, please refer to instructions below

- Log in with admin username and password: admin – password123

- Change your password immediately after your first login

Blogger will automatically create your database tables to store your data, and will and give 'uploads' folder the right permissions.

Creating Wildcard Subdomains

- godaddy: Go to GoDaddy's DNS Manager, the first table on top should say A(Host), click the button under that first table that says Quick Add. In the first text field, enter an asterisk (*), in the second one, the IP address to redirect to (the same one you have for the @ record on top). Click "Save Zone File" on top-right and confirm. reference

- cPanel: Go to subdomains, type "*" in subdomain text field, and click create, thats it!


D) Blog Admin Panel - top

Signing up: Visitors can register an account with Blogger by choosing unique blog name, entering email and password.. every account must have a unique name, no spaces are allowed, the system automatically removes any spaces and special characters

Reset Password: If a visitor forgot their password they can have their passwords reset and new password will be sent to their inbox - the system uses mail() function, you can edit mail setting from the source of forgotpass.php

Blog Settings: In this section a user can enter blog title which is going to show to blog visitors, some text about the blog, and meta tags which are going to be used for search engine optimization. Also users can upload a blog picture

CSS stylesheets: A blog owner (author) can customize the look of their blog by uploading a css file, the file is preferred to be compatible with bootstrap 3.. however they can use basic css files to change simple attributes like colors

Author Settings: In this section a user edits their own personal information which is going to show throughout the website. Social icons on the main site will only show if data is provided for them

Entries: This section shows current entries, here the blog owner can publish/unpublish their entries or click to edit them

Edit Entry: This section is dedicated to edit existing entries

New Entry: Here the author can add a new entry, after finising editing, they can either save or save and publish their entry


D) Miscellaneous - top

php.ini file turns off magic quotes - this is done to allow WYSIWYG editor to operate as desired

Currently blogger allows embedding youtube videos only due to limitations from htmlpurifier (a must have tool to avoid hacking your site), if you need to support more websites than just youtube, please refer to editing htmlpurifier ($config) installation settings

It is recommended that you use your own disqus name for entries comments


E) Sources and Credits - top

The following great classes/plugins/frameworks helped us create our project:


Once again, thank you so much for choosing Blogger. If you have any questions or need support please head to item discussion page on codecanyon.net and I'll be glad to help

omyalpha

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