Geeklog Forums

Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for reading in and offering your thoughts.

I am experienced with old style webmastering...html, javascript, CSS, MySQL, CGI, etc. I want to set up a new site for a special interest community. I see that weblogs are the way to go. I did a lot of reading and Geeklog, though not the most popular, seems to be very secure and thrifty in it's use of system resources. These qualities are more important to me than using the best know names. Sure, finding a million hot themes to try out is great, but not the only thing to consider.

I am not a PHP coder. But for an old dog, I learn new tricks pretty quickly. I will deal with it

So, a few questions:

Can I create a frameless version by creating new templates?

I saw on these Forums that there is a Mod to include PHP functions in static html pages. I also read in the Documentation that PHP code can be used with a couple of restrictions. Are there other restrictions as to the code, functions, or calls that I might want to place on static pages? ( I might be needing a lot of them)

Though I will have a section for users to upload their articles, a lot of my content will be articles I have already written. Will I be able to post an index to a library of articles located in the MySQL database for users to call up? I would like an index or search feature that is more sophisticated than "previous 5 articles".

I did read about URL renaming. But is there a problem with having search engine robots index a GeekLog site? I want robots to see as much of my content as possible.

I have an InvisionPowerBoard BB system that is home to this particular online community now. The user/password information for the board is encrypted in the MySQL database. Will I have to make my members register for the GeekLog based site again, or is there a way to import those tables from the InvisionPowerBoard? Both applications will most likely share the same MySQL database.

I see I am getting really long-winded here. Thanks for any insights you can offer. I can come back with more questions if I have them after these are addressed.

Dale

If you know advanced Javascript or any C, doing some simple PHP should be a piece of cake.



Geeklog doesn't use frames. You could easily get rid of the boxes on each side, if you want.



As long as you are the one writing all of the static pages with PHP, you shouldn't need to worry about security. Letting others write them, however, is a security risk.



I'm not sure exactly what you mean. The search feature is fairly robust, and you can try it out, above. You can also easily write your own index to often read articles by sticking it in a block or a static page.



Currently Google doesn't pick up stories due to their long ids.



It should be fairly easy to write a script to import all of your old users. Geeklog won't do it on its own, though.

I show up on Google regularly because of the content of my stories. So I am not so sure this is completely true. I look at my referers and most often it is the search engines that link not to a specific story but any one of the main pages.

I think Google does not go into the body text of the stories but it does read the intro texts. Since this is what I use the most, I come up in the search engines under the strangest of queries.

Good Luck

Thank you both for your replies.

They were very helpful

Dale