Suggestions for the next version of Advanced Guestbook

G'day...

Though I haven't gone live to my users with my installation of Advanced Guestbook, I'm really finding it great. But naturally, in the course of setting up the guestbook, ones mind tends to come up with ideas for additions / changes / enhancements to the system.

So I thought I'd put down a few of my thoughts for the developers, not in any particular order of importance. Please take these suggestions in the spirit in which they are offered.

GENERAL SETTINGS

Add the ability to specify the URL of the web site's home page in the general settings, and display it somewhere on all user pages if specified.

Allow the administrator to set the width of the page/main table in pixels and/or percentage value in the general settings.

Allow the administrator or provide a title for the guestbook and a description in the general settings. That is, replace the use of the "Guestbook" graphic with a heading text title, and make the description a configuration option rather than editing the language files.

EMAIL SETTINGS

Allow the administrator to set the e-mail subject line for the email that is sent to users in the email settings, instead of via the language files.

Allow the text of the message to the user to be substantially longer than is currently permitted.

Allow the administrator to set the name to be used with the sender/return address on email messages sent to the user.

FIELD DEFINITIONS

Add in provision for MSN and Yahoo fields.

Allow the administrator to specify the image files to be used for the user's email, web site, icq, aim, yahoo and msn icons.

Add a "Not Specified" option to the gender field. Some people just don't want to provide personal information.

Add a birth date field, and use it to display the users astrological sign and/or Chinese birth year animal.

CUSTOM QUESTIONS

Provide support for the administrator to add in up to 10 more custom questions from the general setting page. They would all be text box type questions. The administrator provides the question text, and specifies whether it's a required field or not.

Provide support for at least one more large text area questions. Again the administrator provides the question text, and specifies whether it's a required field or not.

By providing even more of these, users could be prompted for things like: Interests, About Me, Favourite Movies, Favourite Music, Favourite Books etc.

This would give administrators far greater flexibility in customising their guestbook, without having to resort to changing code and database structures.

That's it. Just a few ideas from a slighly different perspective. I think most would be pretty easy to implement, and I think most would make Advanced Guestbook an even more pwerful and flexible service. But that's just my humble opinion. It's up to the developers to decide in the end.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

Everything that you have just mentioned has been done with mods and hacks....there are even more things that have mods made for the guestbook that you don't list....that are out there

So where can I find them?

The only Advanced Guestbook mods I've really found via this forum is how to add in support for MSN and Yahoo.

Here is a list of most of the mods out there

1) Extra question fields,
2) greater control over admin auto emails field length
3) human verification system
4) Dynamic spam trap, checks against most known spam bots and redirects to auto generated email addresses that change on each entry by bot. system emails admin for each spam bot entry to site.
5) Email addresses converted to raw ASCII on the fly in the html source. (protection against spam).
6) Wrapped guestbook into "my" template system. Meaning, that my guestbook templates are blank, and the guestbook uses my own system.
7) Yahoo and MSN mods.
8) HTTP authentication for admin.php, plus renaming of admin file.
9) Changed "post" method to avoid robot sites in addentry.php.
10) other changes, but can’t think of them right now.

Everything else that you mentioned would be an easy fix. As far as pixel and tables, that gets controlled in my templates.

The Gender field, which would be an easy thing to do, is not a bad idea. Not something that I would not use though. The extra field thing has been done, and giving control over this in the admin would not be too hard.

But then again, I don't need these now....so it would be up to others to implement that.

As far as getting them, I have given them out in the past, but I have stopped. There are some forums out there that still have them available to users. You will have to do a search for them.

Thanks Jared,

I have just finished implementing the Gender change.

Currently working on dropping out the display of the Location if one wasn't provided.

Also still working on a few style changes.

Eventually I will try and document what I've done and post the mods back into this forum.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

Lloyd, send me an email, and I will send you everything that I have for the guestbook....

cheers

Well jared would you care to send those to me also. I would pm you but admin has disabled that also now. my email is jtd at ravenprom dot org
thanks.

PS Hey admin whats up no img code cant pm anyone. What gives???