Advanced Guestbook 2.3.1 Mods

G'day...

I've been having a go at modifying Advanced Guestbook 2.3.1 to make it look more like the implementation of phpBB on my site, which uses the subSilver style template.

I think it's coming along okay. There are still a few icon graphics to tidy up, plus a few other changes to make, but it's nearly there.

Along the way I've added "Not specified" as an option for the Gender field. I also don't display anything about the Location if the field is empty. A lot of the changes have been around the way entries are displayed by the entry and preview php files. I still have a few things to tidy up there as well. Adding fields for MSN and Yahoo is my next major task though.

Please feel free to check it out at http://www.borrett.id.au/guestbook.

(It's not linked anywhere to my "live" user community just yet, and any of the data from this testing phase will be dumped before I do go properly live.)

Any comments / suggestions / corrections would be most appreciated. When I'm done, I'll try to make my changes available to you all.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

Hi Lloyd,

I love what you've done with your guestbook - it looks great.

I'd be interested to know what you did to incorporate the same page header in your guestbook as the other pages on your site. I use a dynamic drop down java menu at the top of all my pages and would like to include this in the guestbook.

The 'instructions' for the menu are written into the html header on each page, it checks the users browser then pulls in the appropriate file from the root directory.

Any pointers as to how to include the 'instructions' in the guestbook would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Trevor

G'day Trevor,

Many thanks for your kind words. I've just updated my guestbook test site with a version that supports the addition of Yahoo and MSN. I haven't fully tested those new features yet, but it seems to be working okay.

To get the same page headers into Advanced Guestbook as you havve on the rest of your web site, you'll need to edit the header.php and success.php template files. Just make the beginning of those files nearly the same as the rest of the pages on your web site.

In my case I had to create a custom set of data for the DHTML Menu and those header sections, so that all my links and refences to images elsewhere on my site were of the form "http://www.borrett.id.au/...."
Using relative links as I do on the rest of my site's pages wouldn't work.

You also need to put anything you need to match it from the end of your pages into the footer.php template file, with similar URL changes if necessary.

If you do a "View Source" while looking at my guestbook you should soon get the idea.

Good luck with it Trevor.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

Very nice. I like it. 2 thumbs up.

For my site I use a single header and footer file and have every page call them so I simply just changed the index.php and addentry.php so it called these files and not the ones supplied with the guestbook.

Thanks for the above ideas - it sounds feasible enough. Slight problem at the moment in that the webhosting's gone down

As soon as it's up and running again I'll give it a go and let you know how I get on.

Many thanks again.

Trevor

Awesome guestbook, i luv the phpBB design.

Also I would like to get the yahoo and msn options into my guestbook, how did you do it

?

If you are using 2.3.1 I can email you the zip file with them in. I can't remember who made the mod though.

(just got round to registering)
Awsome! That would be gr8 thanks.

I'll pm you with my email addy.
oh poos, no pming on this board.
wat a bummer, ah well. heres my email addy.. suckerpunchnz@hotmail.com

Thanks dude.
Cheers.

G'day,

The steps to add support for Yahoo and MSNM are covered in other topics within this forum. I deviated quite a bit from that script as I made those additions so that the new fields were implemented in a manner closer to how the existing ICQ and AOL fields were done, than just the standard add an extra field.

I'm currently planning to add another field to the Advanced Guestbook database, with supporting code and template changes, so that I can ask people to enter their country and then display the matching flag.

Once I get that working, I will create a download file of my phpBB subSilver look version of Advanced Guestbook for those of you interested.

Note: This won't be a you beaut version as would be required for these mods to become a configurable part of a future version of Advanced Guestbook. I haven't changed and of the Admin questions to make things like the added Yahoo and MSNM fields admin optional. I've made simple fixed changes to code in many places where others would desire to have configuration driven changes so that they could still run the "standard" version of Advanced Guestbook, or my changed layout version.

I have gone live with the Advanced Guestbook based Fraternity Register on my web site. I've yet to come up with a way to easily imports 2200+ Bravenet Guestbook entries into Advanced Guestbook though.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

G'day,

I've just implemented a modification to Advanced Guestbook so that the user is asked for their country, and if specified, the country name and country flag are displayed in the guestbook.

Please feel free to check it out at http://www.borrett.id.au/guestbook.

Sometime next week I will finish writing up the changes I've made, package it ALL up, and make the whole thing available for anyone to download.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

G'day...

I have just made ALL of my modifications to Advanced Guestbook 2.3.1 available for downloading as a 605 Kb ZIP file at http://www.borrett.id.au/downloads/adv_guestbook_2-3-1_lrb_mods.zip.

In the ZIP you will find the file lrb_readme.txt, being an explanation of the modifications I have made.

Please enjoy.

Best Regards, Lloyd.