v-s.net v0.6

Saturday, 1:24 pm in Archive

Setting Up New Galleries
Pretty straightforward, involces inserting a new row into <tt>galleryxref</tt> via phpMyAdmin. Fill in <tt>galName</tt> and <tt>galDesc</tt> however you want. Leave <tt>galID</tt> blank. If you want your gallery to be a subgallery of another gallery, you’ll need to get the galID of the parent gallery (either through art.php?galID=[thisnum] or by browsing <tt>galleryxref</tt>) and enter it into the <tt>parentID</tt> field. If you want the gallery to be a ‘top level’ gallery, leave this field blank (ie. 0).

Once you’ve made a new gallery, they will appear on the appropriate list on the “upload new art” page.

Creating New Libraries
Much the same as for galleries, except there is no <tt>parentID</tt> option. Uses the <tt>libxref</tt> table.

Creating New Stories
This is probably the most convoluted part of the site… First you need to decide whether your story is going to have one chapter or many.

For a one story chapter, fill in the info in <tt>libstories</tt>; leave <tt>storyID</tt> empty, and make <tt>libID</tt> the ID number of the library you want the story to appear in. <tt>storyPrefix</tt> is for things like ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’ whatever that appear at the start of the title and that you don’t want the story to be aplhabetically ordered by (ie. so if a story is called “The Story”, and you put ‘The’ in <tt>storyPrefix</tt> and ‘Story’ in <tt>storyTitle</tt> it would appear as “The Story” but be between “Redux” and “Tambouriene”).

Af you’ve inserted this, go to the appropriate page in the Libraries; you’ll get an error something like “could not include file x_y_.txt”. Whatever this file name is is the name of the file you’ll need to upload to <tt>/files/library</tt> containing the body of the story. You’ll need to format it as HTML, but not include any head/body elements.

For a multi-chapter story, the process starts out the same (make an entry in <tt>libstories</tt>). Next you’ll need to find what the <tt>storyID</tt> of the story you just entered was, and insert a new row into <tt>libstorychap</tt>. Leave <tt>chapID</tt> blank, and make <tt>storyID</tt> the ID number of the story you want to attach this chapter to. Fill in the rest of the details. <tt>chapPrefix</tt> if for things like “prologue”/”chapter one”/etc., while <tt>chapName</tt> is for the actual name of the chapter (this is what will be the clickable link in the library). Finally, <tt>chapOrder</tt> goversn what order the chapters should appear in. This can either be a word or a number. In the case of a number, it is still ordered alphabetically (so ‘10’ will come between ‘1’ and ‘2’); to get around this, use ‘zero filled’ numbers for stories with more than 9 chapters; ‘01’, ‘02’, etc. This is dodgy, but meh…

Permissions
Log posts, art and stories all have permissions. There are two sets of four permissions. The first set (the <tt>postVis</tt>/<tt>storyVis</tt>/etc.) governs who can see the post/art/story. The second, <tt>comVis</tt>, means who can comment on a specific post/art/story (so someone might be able to read a story but not comment on it).

‘All’ is everyone, ‘Registered’ means only people whoa re registered and logged in, ‘Hush’ is a special case that can be manually given to certain registered users via the user admin panel, and ‘None’ means no-one. A user who has their admin flag set can always read and comment on everything.

Finally, a note about permissions and LiveJournals (DeadJournals, GreatestJournals or whatever); they do, indeed, match. For viewing, All is equivalent to everyone, None to no-one and Registered to friends only.

Hush is a special case that requires you to set up a specific friends group. For each Journal you add via the add Journal page in the admin panel, there is an option to set up a bitmask (ie. a number) for the Hush group; it’s the field after the password. It defaults to 2, which is the number it will be if you have no other groups set up. If you do, it becomes a little trickier; you have to find out the group ID of your hush group directly. The only way thus far I’ve found to reliably do this is to go to the full ‘make new post’ page on LiveJournal and view source; if you look at the section that has the dropdown list for your firneds groups you’ll can find out their group ID numbers from there. There’s got to be a better way of doing it, but buggered if I know how. You have to be reasonably careful with Hush posts going to LiveJournal; if doesn’t do any error-checking, so if it’s not set up right all kinds of people might eb able to see your dark and secret posts…

LiveJournal’s comment permissions aren’t as flexible as sk.log’s, so they don’t map exactly. Basically, I think that if <tt>comVis</tt> is set to All, everyone will be able to post, and if it isn’t, no-one will. Actually… if it’s set to Registered it might go into “screen comments by default” mode, but I’m not sure about that (I rarely ever use <tt>comVis</tt> unless I’m stopping everyone from commenting).

… and now I need to go hang washing out. Coming next time: FAQs and the sitemap. Stay tuned!

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