Technolust

January 20, 2005, 8:01 pm

About Technolust v1.4

Technolust is a simple and scalable GPL Licensed web content creation system using PHP and MySQL. It is not a blogging system, but geared for the creation of pages to distribute information in a simple category/articles system. This is my first PHP/MySQL application, and I would appreciate any code suggestions more experienced developers may have.

Technolust is intended for intermediate users who wish to have more control over their site, and want a sturdy content foundation. Every page is generated from two php files, elminating code redundancy and making the site size extremely small. The look and feel of the site is determined by the single CSS file and variables in the header.php include file modify the site name, site author, and keywords on every page.

The application is broken up into three components, structure, data, and presenation. The PHP files in the /includes directory contain the code that runs on the database and generates the XHTML files displayed to a web browser. The MySQL database stores the content in a simple two table relationship of Categories and Articles. Cascading Style Sheets are used for presentation and customization of the site can easily be done by modif ying the technolust.css file.

Simple and light is the goal of Technolust, and it will never gain anymore major features. Any innovative suggestions and bugs will be looked at and could be added, so please give any feedback you have.

Features:

Fast, secure, and simple dynamic PHP pages
Fast and scalable MySQL Database backend
Simple web administration panel for adding/editing categories and articles, with support for HTML tags
Automatic creation of pages, navigation links, titles, and other information
Page presentation and structure seperate for easy customization
Renders correctly in 800x600+ resolutions and across all major web browsing platforms
100% valid XHTML 1.1 Strict and CSS v2

Demo

A live web demonstration is available for potential users to try out the authoring system and features.

Download

Technolust v1.4

Using Technolust

After following the installation instructions load the indexadmin.php in your browser, and create your first category. This first category created will become the front page and will have no sub articles. Links in the navigation list will be generated off category titles.

When adding category summaries, articles summaries and pages you may use html tags, such as links, images, and paragraphs. Normally each paragraph is a block of text, and can wrap around images if you place the image tag before the block of text, and add the class="floatright" or class="floatright" in the img tag.

There is no deletion option, but rather you can edit the data and make it blank, and replace it with something new (This is to encourage updating of content instead of deleting it).

Installing Technolust

Requirements:

Apache or IIS webserver with PHP 4.0 or higher enabled
MySQL Database server version 3.23 or higher

Notes

This was developed on a GNU/Linux system running Apache 2 with PHP 4.8 and MySQL 4 (LAMP), but any recent versions of Apache, Mysql, PHP, and IIS regardless of Operating System should work without any problems.

Begin by untarring the technolust.tar.gz in a temporary directory, the contents are as follows:

README - Basic information about this application
INSTALL - This file
/includes - The actual working PHP files
/webroot - Web viewable files
/webroot/images - Images for default buttons

You need to know where you web viewable directory is, usually this is /var/www, /var/www/apache2-default on unix/linux/bsd systems. Consult your distributions documentation for the exact location. Windows systems can find this location in the IIS snap-in. If you have any files named the same as the ones in this application they will be overwritten, so be careful not to copy over something you want to keep.

Webpage installation

Edit the the header.php file in the includes directory, changing the Site Wide variables and mysql_password.

Move the entire includes directory to the directory underneath the web viewable one. Such as if the web viewable one is /var/www, move includes to /var.

exp: /tmp/technolust/ $>mv -R includes /var/

Move the files and images directory in webroot to your systems web viewable directory, such as /var/www.

exp: /tmp/technolust/webroot/ $> mv -R * /var/www/

MYSQL Installation

Make sure you have mysql 3.23 or higher and the mysql daemon is running before trying these steps

Begin at your normal command line, then copy each command as they are shown

Log into your mysql database as root, if you do not have root access or creation privledges, please consult your system administrator.

mysql -u root -p

Run this command to create the webpage database

create database webpage;

Give permissions to the webmaster user and create a password

GRANT ALL ON webpage.* TO webmaster IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword';

Use the just created database

use webpage;

Create the category table

create table category (cat_id int unsigned not null auto_increment primary key, cat_name varchar(90) not null, cat_sum text not null, fulltext(cat_name, cat_sum));

Create the articles table

create table articles (art_id int unsigned not null auto_increment primary key, cat_id int unsigned not null, art_title varchar(90) not null, art_date varchar(60) not null, art_sum text not null, art_body text not null, fulltext(art_title, art_sum, art_body));

Quit mysql

quit;

Finishing Up

Once you've copied the PHP files and created your mysql database, point your webbrowser to http://127.0.0.1 or the webserver you installed on, to test the page comes up correctly.

To add/edit content, point your webbrowser to http://127.0.0.1/indexadmin.php or the webserver you installed on, and test adding/editing stories. The first category you make will become the front page and you cannot add any articles below.

Ecliptik.com

Trust your technolust