Updates

1. Shrud Studios project has been going very well. We have almost 89% percent of the site complete. At the moment we are fixing the template system and working on the resource center of the website. Once that is done, we will launch the website for public use. We are also hoping to have at least 20 templates and a series of resource before we launch the website. To make sure we don’t make the same mistake as Zymic, we are not going to save a few layouts and release them on a weekly basis.

2. The nCMS project with Nek Media has been canceled. So I am thinking of releasing myGallery through Shrud Studios.

3. The Sizmos Media project is going pretty well. We are in the process of launching the website once we have things sorted.

Current members:
Designers
* NaRzY
* IamShipon1988
* iamandy
* flyboy
Programmers
* NaRzY
* Bogey
* wozzym
* IamShipon1988
* nitsuarox
Support
* NaRzY
* iamandy
* IamShipon1988
* Bogey
* Crown
* Trippin7464
* MrTouz
Featured Testers
* Trippin7464
* Crown
* fenerli

Introduction:
The main reason for this CMS to be built is not only allow a versatile, portable CMS to be released for free but to help the users on Zymic obtain a CMS which they can use and understand. Not only that, seeing how we built it, we are going to know how all the answers to your problems as we built it and wrote every line of code.
This project is of course open source (for everyone), but I do not want anyone except those listed above to post in here as it will get messy and end up with questions and all that sort of thing that we do not need at the moment.
Hopefully, this CMS will make Zymic more customisable and user friendly for those not so computer technical.

To be done:

1. Create the website (NaRzY)
2. Decide on a name (I vote for nCMS. )
3. Do up a v1.0 list on what should be released.

Ideas:
* User Auth: : Login/Profile/Logout/Special access pages,
* eCommerce : Have a shopping cart of your own,
* News system : Keep the users up-to-date with the goings on around your site,
* AdminCP : To look after your site with many useful tools and features to help keep your site in tip top shape,
* Multimedia plugins : Such things as music players, flash players to help you upload and add multimedia to your site,
* Simple forum : Have discussions about your site on there,
* Blogging : Use this feature if you would like a simple yet effective blog without have to code WP-Styles,
* Templates define the content not the other way round (i.e. flexible templating system),
* User definable URL scheme,
* Page hierarchies/menu structure facilitating organic site-map generation,
* Content tagging/non-hierarchical categories,
* Supportive of ‘News’ and ‘Blog’ style postings,
* External API support (e.g. MarsEdit & Flickr) such as XMLRPC,
* Content caching for traffic-heavy sites (both for entire templates and pieces of content such as parsed HTML comments),
* Humane text-formatting (Markdown, SmartyPants, HTMLPurifier, organic headings),
* WYSIWYM content entry,
* Plug-in API,
* Internationalisation including localised language, time formatting, text-direction, and character set support,
* Humane time-descriptors (i.e. ‘3 days ago’, ’42 minutes ago’),
* Uploading of rich media content including images, embedded or otherwise,
* Syndication (RSS2, Atom, e-mail),
* Exposing of data for Javascript (or other) manipulation via XML & JSON,
* Search,
* User management including user-defined settings and custom profile data,
* Workflow management,
* Drafting and publish dates,
* ‘Directory discovery’ - CMS discovers content uploaded into directories or e-mailed to an address,
* Auto-update - the CMS should be version aware and attempt to update itself non-destructively,
* OpenID and Gravatar support,
* User and usergroup action and page-view permissions,
* Comment moderation,
* Pagination across all content types,
* Trackback/pingback support,
* Spam detection,
* Non-destructive deleting (revision/undo history)

Contact details:
For any details regarding the project, please email me at: [jacob.bednarz@unify-reasons.com] with the subject as “nCMS + your enquiry”. Or you can PM me here on Zymic.

So stay tuned for more updates!

So whats an advantage of include?
If you want to modify your site, and you have tons of page, and do not want to modify each one of them separately; when you use php include, all you have to modify is the file your including. In this example, all you have to do is modify the header.php and footer.php (also the style.css) that will change the layout to whatever you wish. It sort of acts as an StyleChanger effect but it requires a bit more work.

Step 1: Create the file you want to call for. Example, this header file: “includes/header.php.” So we have these codes for the header file:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>
</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="includes/style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="holder">
<!-- holds the title and the navagation bar -->
<div class="header">
<!-- holds the logo -->
<div id="logo">
<img src="../images/logo.idontknow" alt="RIT Web Dev Logo" />
</div>
<div id="nav">
<br />
<a href="index.php" alt="home">Home</a>|
<a href="forum.php" alt="forum">Forum</a>|
<a href="members.php" alt="members">Members</a>|
<a href="about.php" alt="about">About</a>|
<a href="contact.php" alt="contact">Contact</a>
</div>
<hr />
</div>
Step 2: Since we will not have the ability to edit this page for the pages that will have a different title, we will need to add a variable that will allow us to accomplish that. So in order for us to give custom title to our main pages, we will need to replace the title tags with the following:
<title>
<?php
echo $title;
?>
</title>
Step 3: Now lets create our footer file (you can create a sidebar, but I’m skipping that for the sake of time). We don’t have to make any changes in this file unless you want to include something else from another location. Lets call this file footer.php and put it also in the includes folder.
<hr />
<div class="copyright">
© 2007 RIT Web Developers, All Rights Reserved <br />
<a href="contact.php"> Contact Us </a>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Step 4: Okay, since we are now done with all the files we want to include in our index.php file, lets create the most important file: index.php. A general HTML file without header and footer will look something like this:
<div id="content">
<h1> Content Title </h1>
<p>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Fusce quis ante.
Ut sit amet arcu eu lacus sodales egestas. Sed metus risus, placerat vitae,
molestie sit amet, consequat eu, erat. Quisque tincidunt, urna sed
pellentesque adipiscing, risus nulla congue urna, et pharetra tortor massa
in leo. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes,
nascetur ridiculus mus. Quisque tellus. Phasellus iaculis lacinia diam. In
nonummy, tortor id rutrum fermentum, metus lacus ultrices turpis, sit amet
hendrerit pede leo vitae neque. Aenean lacinia metus eu tellus. Quisque
tempor dolor at velit. Etiam luctus fermentum justo. Pellentesque erat
mauris, consectetuer a, commodo at, ultrices vel, lacus. Proin sit amet
leo. Vivamus sit amet tellus.
</p>
</div>
But that does not include our header.php and footer.php. So we need to call for it. We can accomplish this by using 3 lines of php codes. So above all the codes in our index.php code, we want to include our header. We can do this by pasting the following code:
<?php
include("includes/header.php");
?>
Step 5: Remember when we added echo $tittle; in our header to allow us to give the page custom title? Well this is the additional work needed to accomplish that. Before the area where it states include(”includes/header.php”); we will add the following line of title:
$title = "Page 1";
Simply replace the Page 1 with your own page title.
Step 6: Now its time for us to call our footer. This can be accomplished the same way as in step 4. Simple paste the following code towards the bottom of the index.php file.
<?php
include("includes/footer.php");
?>

Well your done! What you have to note is that you can place footer.php and header.php in any folder you want, just make sure you call it correctly. Many php programmers make that mistake, thereby end up spending hours finding the problem, although the problem is simple. Just as a word of warning/caution Windows versions of PHP prior to PHP 4.3.0 do not support accessing remote files via this function.

If you put all these codes together, you should get a page similar to the demo page (unless I end up modifying the page). If you want to use the same css, then here it is:
.copyright {
}
.header {
border: thick #000000;
text-align:center;
}
#holder {
margin: auto;
width: 700px;
}
#logo {
}
#main {
}
#nav {
}
/***************
Links
***************/
a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
}
a {
text-decoration:none;
color:#0066CC;
}

Currently, as a student at the university, I am in debate. The college itself keeps it word about being challenging. But its not for the reason you would think. Unlike many other universities who follow the semester rule (16 weeks), RIT believes in using the Quarter system. So instead of having 16 weeks to learn the content (like you would in a semester school), you need to learn the same content within 10 weeks. This is the reason for many bad grades in the college. You cannot rush the students to stuff this much content in short period of time. Learning needs time and that needs to be granted right? Actually, I kind of like the quarter system. Yes I have failed 2 classes but this is actually teaching me a lesson. Life is not going to slow down for you. You gotta stop chasing the donkey to pin its tail in place, but rather catch it from the front.

What I hate about my school is the vacation time. Who in their right mind will give 2 weeks off for thanksgiving? Right now I am on my spring break. I know what your thinking, its early. I agree. Many, if not all, have their vacation towards the end of march. Yes it is agreeable to have a vacation right at the end of the quarter but its too early to call this spring break. I would rather have a break when my friends have a break, so that when I get home, I am not bored out of my mind stuck at home. I want RIT to change its policies.

Ok I’m really tired now, and this Journal/Blog entry did not go in the direction as I had hoped and yes I do realize the grammar errors. Oh well, thats life. So I’ll just list what I did this week.

Friday - Came home from university. Hurt my elbow and had to wear a cast-like elbow wrap. To make matters worse, I had a wire go in my fingers about 1 centimeter. It hurt but I didn’t realize what was going on until I saw the blood. Haha, ouch.

Saturday - I really don’t remember what happened on saturday. I think I spent the entire day at home doing nothing. I do remember one thing, my friend called me up with a plan to surprise two people for their birthday. So I went through Jackson Heights trying to find find a gift for one of them. Ended up getting a pair of 14K gold earrings with antique stone in the center.

Sunday - Went to the surprise party and it went great. We all had fun and Tenzin and I decided to watch the 10,000 BC movie. We went to the theatre to find out that it doesn’t release until the upcoming friday. Then some events occurred, went into a moment of awe and sadness. Oh when I turned on my phone, my inbox was filled with new text message saying “PLEASE SMILE.” I thought that it was really caring that she spent all that money to text me. Haha I didn’t get charged, since I have the monthly text plan

Monday - Met up with a old high school science teacher who had a large impact on me. Got to give a lecture to his Honors Physics class on somethings that they will face in college and how not to ignore what the teacher said since I did that and it didn’t work out that great for me. Later on he treated us to free lunch. Had a great tasting Chicken Sandwich. Went to Best Buy and bought Sony VAIO T2310 Laptop for my dad. He was pretty excited and I think he fell in love with the laptop.

Tuesday - Today I found out how much both my father and I really hate Windows Vista. The OS, I’m sorry to say this, IT SUCKS. Just moving a browser left and right ate up almost 10% of my speed. It just pisses me off now. Now getting off that, I went to New Jersey today. Drove 1.3 hours to Elizabeth, New Jersey; stayed there for 30 minutes, and drove back 1.3 hours. Ate lunch at Target and returned home.

Wednesday - Yeay now I get to talk about today…No nothing excited really happened, I’m just soo bored that I did not want to be caught sounding soo boring. I know I suck at this but what the hell; who cares..haha. So I bought a set of wireless keyboard and mouse for myself. Its the Labtec Media Wireless Desktop 800 series. I’m surprised to say this but I think I really like this keyboard and mouse. Wow. Keyboard is silent so I’m not waking anyone up with all this typing and I get to blind my brother with the laser from the mouse. MUHAHAhA.

Ok thats enough. I gotta get some sleep. NIGHT HOME SLICES (no I am not part of a gang nor am I “ghetto”).