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Instant Update v.2Welcome to the Instant Update manual. This document will provide useful tips in using this content management system. If there is no answer to your question supplied here, then you can contact authors of this CMS3 via website http://www.instant-update.com/. |
Table of contents:
What is this?
This
is non-typical Content Management System (CMS), but, as mentioned, it is not
typical CMS, which you install, add your content and that is that. This CMS
is much more opened to you as end user, and as webmaster. How? Well, you must
first create your site (which is harder but you can customize it as you want,
you must not be limited to templates of one CMS) and then you must convert it
to this CMS's engine, and then you can start.
Please note that this CMS is made for presentations, not for complicated sites
(web applications). With this you can only manage static texts on your site.
But, ofcourse, even if you are using this CMS, you can still have dynamic content
onto your site, but it cannot be edited with this CMS. If you are confused,
please start using this CMS and then you'll see what we thought.
To make this CMS functional onto your web site, you must have this on your web site enabled:
Configuration of Instant Update before installation is not needed since v.2.0 - upload contents of downloaded IU archive to your web site, chmod connection.php inside manage/ folder to 777 and you may proceed with installation.
To install this script, upload it to your web site (everything except plus/ folder) and navigate to http://www.yourdomain.com/path/to/manage/ and automatic, three step installation will begin. First step will make sure that your configuration file is chmodded and has writing permissions ;) Second step will ask you to enter MySQL database settings as well as administrator user name and password. Third step will tell you if you had some errors, but in most cases it'll just notify you that everything is okay and that you need to delete install/ folder :) When you delete install/ folder, you can proceed with Converting your site!
Converting your site
Let's convert your site to be compatibile with our fresh installed CMS: In just 4 easy steps convert your web site so it can be managed with our CMS:
Also, you can get tools for automatic converting of your site on this url: http://www.instant-update.com/plus/
To use this CMS, just point to it via your web browser. Example: http://www.yourdomain.com/ What would you see. Your site, not modified at all. So... what is the purpose of this CMS? Well, you see, it's just one ease for site administrators and/or moderators. Point to, eg. http://www.yourdomain.com/manage/ and you'll see login form. Log in with your user name and password (entered while installing this CMS). You will now see your web site but with custom header, and if administrator, with custom footer. Now you can play ;)
In header you will find several useful options, such as:
After you install
our CMS, you will see header on top of every of your pages. The header will
look something like that one below on image 11. Then you
need to find "To add new content to your site - click
here..." and to click on link saying "click here".
Then you will be asked for content's2 name. Here you can write whatever
you want. For example, let's use: "intro". Type "intro"
inside that text box and press "Create". The block will be created
immidiately and you will be taken to the WYSIWYG4 editor for that block. There
you need to enter text (in this case intro for your site) and to press "Save".
The text will be saved to database but it will not (yet) be shown on web site.
New blocks can only be added by administrators, so the new blocks can be added
to page only by administrators also. In other words, only administrators can
change look of web page. Moderators can just change contents of pages...
To add block to page, click on "edit this page"1 image
at the end of the page and in the simple HTML editor you will be able to insert
block to the page with only one click (image 2).
The blocks of text will be surrounded (in editor) with [content] tag. Hover
the block's name to see first few words of that block.
image 1: Administrator's header
image 2: Quick adding blocks of text to page
To enable file uploads within WYSIWYG editor, just create folder UserFiles/ (name is case sensitive) in the root of your web site. Inside that folder create folders File/, Flash/ and Image/ (names are case sensitive) and chmod all 4 (four) folders to 777. When you've created these folders, file uploads will work.
Instant Update 2 brings new feature: dynamic pages. You can have as much pages as you want without adding php files for each page. You can set every already IU converted page to be dynamic page by simply clicking at "make dynamic page" in IU's page editor (non-closing [pagecontent] bb code will be inserted into your page).
The philosophy behind dynamic pages is simple:
image 3: Making page dynamic
Let's say we made page.php dynamic page. Now we can link to our new page with such link: page.php?page=new-page
When you visit that link, IU will notify you that you don't have block of text named new-page. Create it, and there's your new page.
Search Engine Optimized page URLs
If you take a look at section before this one, you'll see that our dynamic pages are linked through page.php file (page.php?page=page-name). Some search engines recognize these URLs as dynamic pages (which they are) and refuse to index page content for each parameter separately (paremeter is text after ?page=).
If your web site is running at Apache Web Server with mod_rewrite support (over 70% sites ARE on Apache w/ mod_rewrite) then you can fool search engines and represent each page as separate file (it's completely legal) by creating simple .htaccess file in the root of your web site. Here's an example of .htaccess file which will redirect all PAGENAME.iu files to page.php?page=PAGENAME:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+).iu$ page.php?page=$1
This code, placed in .htaccess file, will simply all .iu pages redirect to page.php. Note that first page will be default.iu and it will display SAME content as page.php called without any parameters.
You can find sample .htaccess in /plus/htaccess-rewrite.txt.
We have noticed
that on some web sites, when CMS is successfully installed, users can not log
in. That was problem with our site (http://www.instant-update.com/)
when we uploaded our CMS to our site (we are developing this in local network
(offiline) and everything worked perfectly), so we have revealed the problem:
The sessions (which our CMS is using to store user data) were not saved at all
because TMP path was not set properly inside php.ini file.
To solve this problem you need to copy /plus/htaccess-sessions.txt to root
of your web site (named as .htaccess), or append this one to existing .htaccess
file. If this can't solve your problem, the TMP path on your server might not
be /tmp (as set in .htaccess file. In this
case you will have to contact your hosting provider to ask them where sessions
are stored, and change the given .htaccess file according to
that information.
If you don't have permissions to use .htaccess file, you will
have to ask your hosting provider to change sessions' TMP path to /tmp,
or to help you in any other way. We just can't help you if you don't have privilegies
to use .htaccess file. But don't worry, very often our users
are not faced with this problem.
Important: If you are faced with this problem,
and you have uploaded given .htaccess file, and still facing
the same problem, please try to login again. This is unknown problem, but sometimes
it is needed to log in several times before login is successful. Note
that this can occur even when no .htaccess file is present.
So, log in several times, then do stuff with given .htaccess
file described above.
It is very important to backup your site's contents at least once in a month. Why? Well, if hosting's server brokes or your site is attacked by malicious hackers. Within this CMS we have made tool which will backup all your site's contents (stored in MySQL database) and your site's moderators and administrators. The backup will be standard .SQL file (SQL script) which can be restored using any MySQL managing software. E.g. phpMyAdmin (which cames with lot of hosting packages). The link for creating backups is shown in every page's header, and no matter from which page it is called - it will backup entire site (blocks and users only). But, there are two ways of creating backups:
1. To store backup onto your web site you need to have /manage/backup/ folder with chmod 777, so backup can store .SQL (backup) file to this folder. When you execute backup script, backup will be created, stored in /manage/backup/ folder and you will have option to view/download that file. When you do this kind of backup the backup will be stored on web site so you can restore it from any computer (but still you'll have to download it, then restore it - it will just be accessible from every location (if you know URL ;))).
2. If you want this kind of backup just delete backup folder
from /manage/ folder, or just (if you're on Unix/Linux hosting)
don't chmod backup folder to 777 - leave it
on 644. When backup script notices that file can't be created
(folder not chmodded or not exists), it will send backup to your browser for
downloading. This is not recommended but for sure is safer (you don't have to
keep backup urls secret - although passwords of users are encrypted, it is always
wise not to show this SQL scripts to everyone).
It is wise to password protect /backup/ folder.
This web application
is coded in PHP4 but it is tested and it WORKS on PHP5, developed by Webinsane team, and all respective rights, including
all code, images and ideas are reserved. The owner of this CMS is Webinsane,
http://www.instant-update.com/
- you can purchase this application on our web site.
Idea [extensible CMS]: Tomo Vukasović
Coding [php, javascript, html]: Nemanja Avramović
Graphics [logo, signature, buttons]: Tomo Vukasović
*** This CMS is using TinyFCK:
open source WYSIWYG web editor
1 -
administrators only
2 - block of text: block, content, chunk, paragraph, etc...
3 - Content Management System
4 - What You See
Is What You Get
- a MS Word-like text editor for web
