Introduction
This is a generic help file for the upage Geeklog plugin. For site-specific information please contact your system administrator
The User Pages (upage) plugin is intended to provide users to the site their own space where they can create and manipulate their own HTML pages. Pages can be created, altered and deleted. Users can view a list of their own pages, but pages of other users can only be seen if the other user publishes a 'homepage'. See below for details.
By default, a user has no pages in the upage system. But once logged on they can easily create pages by selecting the "New" button, entering their page content, then hitting "Submit". The presence of your pages will not be known to others on the site until you create a "homepage"
Homepage
When you create your own user pages, you will not be visible to the casual browser until you create one page with the label "homepage". Then your username will show up when someone clicks the "Users" button in the top left. Until you create a page with the label "homepage", the only way a non-administrator will be able to know about your pages is if you give them the direct URL to the page.
At present the system does not prevent you from having more than 1 page with the label "homepage", but the behavior is undefined if you do have more than one. So it is up to you to ensure that you have only 1 page with the label "homepage".
Fields
Here is a quick description of the fields you can define.
ID
This field is the name of the page you are creating, and it will appear in the URL of your page. All of your page names will start with your username (with spaces and apostrophes removed), written in lowercase, and followed by an underscore (_). The rest of the page name is for you to define if you like, or you can simply accept the numeric default name, which is guaranteed by the system to be unique.
The only characters which should be used in your page ID are A-Z, A-z, 0-9 and _ (underscore). You can leave your portion of the ID completely blank if you want, in which case your URL for that page will be
http://www.bodensatz.com/upage/index.php?page=username_
You may want to do this for your homepage.
Hits
This field is automatically updated by the system so that you will know how many people have visited your page.
Title
The page title appears at the top of the page when someone is viewing it. The system will always prepend it with your username so that the viewer always knows whose page they are viewing.
Label
At present this field is only used to define your homepage as noted above.
Private
Flag this page as private so it will not be included in searches, and cannot be viewed by anyone except the owner (or the administrator).
Enable Comments
Enable comments. You will only see this field if the site administrator has enabled comments for upage. When you check this box, visitors to your page will be able to leave comments behind in precisely the same manner that comments work on the rest of the site.
Content
Here is where your page content goes. There is no limit on how much content you can enter, but you will note on the edit page that there is a limit as to which HTML tags you are allowed to use. The allowed tags are defined by the administrator.
Last Updated
This field is automatically updated to the current date and time whenever you edit your page. Future releases of the plugin may allow other users to subscribe to your page so that they will automatically get notified whenever you edit it.
Special Commands
Plain Text
New in upage 2.0 is the "plain text" setting. When you are editing your page, you will see a new field which allows you to specify your page as 'plain text'. This is for people who do not know HTML and do not want to learn it. If you click this box, all HTML special characters will be stripped from your page. Some of the below special commands (noted in each case) are for use only when operating in plain text mode. They allow you to replicate some simple HTML functionality without having to know HTML.
[link]pagename[/link]
If you want to link to another of your pages, you can use this structure in your page content to do so. The "pagename" that you use should be your page ID minus your username part. i.e. you only specify the part of the name that you yourself have control over - the part you can edit in the page editor. The hotlinked part of the link will be your page title.
Note that there is a known bug where if the special link command is the very first thing in the content, or the very last, it will not work.
Also note that you can still use regular HTML linking.
[pic]photo.jpg[/pic]
If the site administrator has enabled upic support, then you can upload your own photos, and include them in your pages with the special [pic] command. In the simplest form, you provide only the name of the photo you wish to include in your page, as shown above. Optionally, you can also specify what size you wish to show (see below for details), whether it should be aligned to the left, center, or right, and finally a userid to be able to include photos from another user.
[pic]photo.jpg|small|center|17[/pic]
This statement includes 'photo.jpg', size 'small', centered, from user 17. Note that the fields you specify must always come in that order, and if you do not want to specify an earlier field you must leave it blank. For example, if you want to include a photo from another user, but want to take the default settings for both size and alignment, then you would do this :
[pic]photo.jpg|||17[/pic]
The 3 vertical bars in a row indicate that for the middle two fields we wish to accept the default settings.
Note that the alignment of photos with this statement can be finicky, and even if you only want to include a single photo you may wish to use the [pics] statement instead.
[pics]photo1.jpg,photo2.jpg[/pics]
This command allows you to include multiple photos from your collection, and they will be presented in a table which by default has 3 columns. Only the site administrator can change this default. Since you can specify as many photos as you like, it gives you a means to simulate photo albums. For each album you wish to simulate, just create a upage and include a [pics] statement listing all the photos you wish to have in that album. It's easy! Note that at the moment there is not way to specify the extra settings which exist for the [pic] command, so you get the defaults : size small, centered, and from your photo collection.
***bold faced text***
This if only for use in plain-text mode. If you want to create boldfaced text, simply put 3 asterisks on each side of the text you wish to boldface. When your page is displayed, the asterisks will automatically be stripped away and replaced with the properly HTML tags to show your text as boldfaced. You can do this as often as you like in your pages.
___underlined text___
This if only for use in plain-text mode. If you want to create underlined text, simply put 3 underscores on each side of the text you wish to underline. When your page is displayed, the underscores will automatically be stripped away and replaced with the properly HTML tags to show your text as underlined. You can do this as often as you like in your pages.
///italic text///
This if only for use in plain-text mode. If you want to create italic text, simply put 3 forward slashes on each side of the text you wish to have italicised. When your page is displayed, the underscores will automatically be stripped away and replaced with the properly HTML tags to show your text in italics. You can do this as often as you like in your pages.
combinations of the above three
The above bold, underscore and italics can be used in any combination you wish to create multiple effects.
--- list item
This if only for use in plain-text mode. If you wish to create an HTML list like this :
then simply use 3 dashes together at the first of a line. Only at the first of a line will the 3 dashes be converted to an HTML list.
------ horizontal line
This if only for use in plain-text mode. If you wish draw a horizontal separator line across your page, use six dashes together.
New line and new paragraph
This if only for use in plain-text mode. A single carriage-return will translate into a new line, and a double carriage-return will translate into a new paragraph.
Linking Photos
There are 2 ways to include photos in your user pages : regular HTML, and 'upic'. As of version 2.0, upage now has native photo capability called 'upic' which allows you to upload photos and link them into your pages. Photo capability - either upic or HTML - has to be enabled by the site administrator.
For the Administrator
HTML Photos
To enable HTML photos in upage, you have to edit Geeklog's config.php file. By default the 'img' tag is not allowed in the Geeklog site software, and the site administrator has to enable it in the config.php file. To enable, the system administrator must look for the line :
$_CONF['user_html']
and add the following entry :
'img' => array('border' => 1, 'src' => 1, 'width' => 1, 'height' => 1),
For the User
If the administrator has enabled the 'img' tag on your site, you will be able to include them in the content of your pages. If not, then any 'img' tag you enter into your site content will be automatically stripped out by the Geeklog site software.
The tags work as they do with regular HTML, and allow you to include images into your pages. While the upage software itself does not yet allow for the uploading of images by the user to the site, there is other plugin software which does allow this. Perhaps your site uses either "gallery" or "geekary" which allows you to upload your own photos.
Linking Photos from Gallery
If the gallery is installed on your site, and the administrator gives you permissions to upload photos, this section will tell you how to link the photos into your user pages. The example give here is from Bodensatz Brewing, whose webmaster is the author of the upage software you are using. Bodensatz uses the Gallery, and allows members to upload their own photos to it. Any member who requests their own photo album will get one. The example given here will be from the album called "AlanMcKay", who is the author of the software.
You can view this album at :
http://www.bodensatz.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=AlanMcKay. And we will take the example of the photo "alancostume" within that album. It is a picture of Alan and his beer keg halloween costume. Yes, it did actually serve beer from that tap.
When photos get uploaded to the Gallery software, the software automatically creates a smaller thumbnail photo which gets used in the album overview when showing all the photos in the album. And if the submitted photo was large enough, an intermediate-sized photo gets created as well. So there will always be at least 2, and possibly 3 photos created. When viewing a photo that you want to include in your User Page, you must use the "view source" feature of your browser to find where the photo lives in order to include it. From the ablum view, when viewing all the photos in the album, the "view source" command will show you where the thumbnail lives. If you click on the above album link and do "view source", you can then search on "alancostume" to find the following line :
To include this in your User Page, you must use exactly the same 'img' statement. Actually, if the image you want to include is on the same website as your User Page, then you can use a shorthand which discludes the name of the site, as shown here :
Both of these will show the following photo :
If you want to include the photo on a site other than Bodensatz.com, you must use the first form. If you want to use it on Bodensatz.com, you can use either form.
If you want the full-sized image from the gallery, you simply take the '.thumb' out of the file name to get the following :
to see the following image :
Note that the width and height tags are optional, but if you use them it will make your page load more quickly.
UPIC Photos
As of version 2.0, the geeklog upage plugin supports it's own native photo upload capability called 'upic'. This must be enabled by the site administrator in the config.php file which comes with upage. In that file look for the global configuration variable $_CONF['upic_enabled']. There are three different settings you can use :
$_CONF['upic_enabled'] = "";
This completely disables native photo support so users cannot upload and manipulate their own photos. If this is disabled, the administrator still has the option to enable regular HTML photos - see above for details.
$_CONF['upic_enabled'] = "native";
This configures upage to use it's own built-in native 'upic' software.
$_CONF['upic_enabled'] = "upic";
This configures upage to use the separte 'upic' plugin, which actually does not exist yet. After releasing upage version 2.0, I will strip out all of the UPIC stuff and make a separate plugin called 'upic', which will have far more features than the native upic. But the code is already in place to allow you to switch from native photo support, to the upic plugin when it becomes available.
What does it do?
The intent of the native upic capability is not to be a replacement for the popular 'Gallery' which many geeklog sites have installed. For one thing, it does not have multiple photo albums although there is a mechanism which makes it easy to simulate them. Upic is designed to be a place where users can upload photos, add captions to them, then include these photos in their upage pages with minimal effort. The intent is to make the inclusion of photos easy, even for people who do not know and do not want to learn HTML.
The upcoming standalone 'upic' plugin will however be a replacement for Gallery.
Overview
If upic has been enabled by your site administrator, you will see a [ Photos ] option in the menu bar at the top of the upage screen. Clicking on it brings you to a list of each user on the sytem who currently has photos in the system. Unlike most popular photo gallery software, clicking on the photo does not bring you into the complete photo gallery. Instead, clicking the photo simply enlarges that photo. To see all the photos from a particular user, click the username above the photo. Below the photo you will see a caption if one was provided by the user, and below that you will see 'edt / del' if you have permission to edit or delete that photo.
Once again, the native upic support is not intended to be a replacement for Gallery. For one thing, there are no multiple albums. All photos get uploaded to the same place, and so practically speaking this may become cumbersome after a few dozen photos have been entered. There is also not way to sort photos - they are automatically arranged by their upload date. All of this will be taken care of when the stand-alone upic plugin is eventually released.
Adding Photos
To add photos to your collection, simply click the 'add' button in the page header. You will be presented with a screen which by default allows you to upload a single photo. Here you will see by default the numbers from 1 to 5, which can be clicked to upload multiple photos at once. The site administrator can change this default to allow up to 10 photos to be uploaded at once. A photo caption can be added at upload time, or specified later. The 'highlight' field allows you to specify the photo which shows up on the main 'users' page where all users are listed.
If you see the text "will resize to Max XYZ" to the right of the numbers 1 through 5 in the title bar of the 'add' page, this means the site administrator has enabled a maximum photo size, which will be displayed as XYZ. This maximum applies to the longest of the 2 dimensions of your photo. So for landscape photos it applies to the X axis, and for portrait photos to the Y axis. You can still upload photos larger than this, but they will automatically be resized to this dimension.
Another setting which the site administrator can set is the maximum aspect ratio : i.e. the ratio between the X and Y axes. At present this does not show up anywhere so you will only know if you've overshot the value. The default is 1.5. Normal photos have an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 1.333. This setting can prevent the uploading of extremely tall-and-narrow or short-and-wide photos.
Auto-Sizing
By default when you upload a photo, several alternate sizes will be automatically created and stored in the system for your use. There are 4 possible sizes : full, screen, small and thumb. 'screen' defaults to 640 pixels on the longest axis, 'small' to 150, and 'thumb' to 30. The site administrator can disable all but 'full' if so desired. But since hard disk space is so cheap these days, and network bandwidth still at a premium relatively speaking, it is highly recommended to keep these. If you upload a photo which is smaller than any of these sizes, then your photo will not be sized to that size.
Using the special [pic] command (see above for details) you can display any of the sizes you wish, along with the photo caption. Except for the thumbnail size - captions are not shown for thumbnails, nor is there any way to show them. Or you can click on the "edit" button to view all of the alternative sizes which are available, and their location in the system so you can easily include them in your HTML statements.
