Blog Integration

Partial integration developed by a Allen Look.

This documentation could use some polishing

I've integrated the SuperSimple blog into Feng Office, under a tab of its own. This is probably not a graceful thing to have done, but it looks quite attractive, and it makes it easy for a bunch of us to type and save announcements instead of me hacking HTML every time I want to say something to the team at large.

The CMS (Content Management System) which is used to enter blog entries, is somewhat separate from the blog display for security reasons, so only the blog entries are shown on the tab, although it could be further modified I suppose to include the login and security part, which is NOT currently integrated in any way with Feng Office, it's just standing on its own.

This blog software, available at supersimple.org, was full of bugs when I first downloaded it, but I believe all of that's fixed and it's fully customizable by using the CSS files included.

There are no real bells or whistles with it otherwise, which is why I chose it in the first place.

Apparently I can't post screenshots to the forum, but if there's any interest, I could zip up all the files and the MySQL database and post them here, then they could be downloaded and installed by others.

This WILL require some PHP/HTML/MySQL knowledge on the installers part.

Source: http://forums.fengoffice.com/index.php?topic=3809.msg14007#msg14007

Install instructions can be found in three forum posts here.

They have been transcribed exactly.

The source code for SuperSimple is available at supersimple.org. I downloaded it from there but I had a lot of trouble with the code, some of which may have been related to my server config, I don't know, but I fixed all the bugs I found and I also made it possible to insert images in the blog postings that would be left-aligned, inline or right-aligned.

I will attach a redacted copy of my new source code for SuperSimple to this posting as ssbs.zip. You should extract the ssbs folder into your website under your Feng Office directory, then open and read the readme.txt file.

Pick a database name for SSBS and create that database using your favorite MySQL tool. Give it a username and password too. The readme.txt will instruct you on how to set up your SQL pointers to use these values.

Run the setup.php file included with SSBS per the readme.txt. This is where all sorts of things went wrong for me, due to <? and <?= tags needing to be converted to “<? php” and “<? php echo” throughout all the scripts, and due to permissions on the blogImages and comments directories needing to be set manually. There is no help on the web site for SuperSimple, so this is where it will require a little head-scratching if you run into problems.

Download here

I recommend during setup that you specify the name of your blog file as feng_blog.php as I have. I've included a bunch of redirect or blank index.php files for security and they may refer to this file already.

Once SSBS is installed, it is not at all clear what you are supposed to do with it to make it work!

The secret is that your blog postings will appear in the file you specified during setup (SSBS renames its index.php to the name you specify), but there's no directions on what to do if you want to ADD or EDIT blog postings.

What you have to do is go to the CMS directory under SSBS. I ran into a lot of errors here as well, so I blanked out the index.php file for security. The file you want to run here if you want to manage your blog is login.php - THAT is the file that will help you log in and make blog entries, clear them out, etc…

What SSBS does NOT tell you is how to log in either! I found by trial and error that there are two user arrays created during setup, in the file named /ssbs/settings.php. The first one is $USERS, and the second one, which is required for login, is at the bottom of the file, called $users_login. Set up that array of username/passwords and you'll be able to log into the CMS and start entering blog entries.

If all has gone well, you have a working SuperSimple Blog nestled next to your Feng Office installation, but it still doesn't appear on its own tab.

I am hoping that everyone is able to follow the “Hello World” postings here in the forum to be able to create their own tab, and to point it at the “feng_blog.php” file.

It took me some time to follow those steps and get it working nicely, but I know it's quite possible. Perhaps someone could help me as well by reiterating those steps more precisely in a HOW-TO.

allenlook