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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONSAs with the TROUBLESHOOTING section of the Manual, as Review Site becomes more widely used and issues are addressed regarding its use in various situations, the list of Frequently Asked Questions on this page will grow. h3>Can you recommend any Web Designers?I am always on the lookup for good web designers who have worked with Review Site and can take clients that need a little help getting their site presentable. So if you fit the bill, contact me so that I can add you to the list below (currently empty). You need to have either purchased Review Site for yourself, or for a client, for me to consider adding you to this list (otherwise I have no basis for determining whether you know what Review Site is all about--nor do clients want to contact someone who has no Review Site experience). So, here's my list of web designers who have used Review Site and agreed to be listed here. Will you be the first on this list?
How do I set up a MySQL database?Unless you have set up databases before, this may be the trickiest part of the installation process. However, it is generally not that difficult and often your hosting control panel will do the job for you. Fortunately for us, the VBulletin site contains some useful tutorials on the subject of how to set up a MySQL database for VBulletin use, and you can apply the same information to setup up a database for Review Site use. These are their instructions for the major hosting control panels, and a command line install too: Remember to write down your database hostname, database name, and database username and password for when it comes time to run the Review Site installer script.
How do I change the content of the public navigation bar?The content of the navigation area on public pages is contained in the template named navigation.tpl. This is styled with the content of the CSS file tabbed_navigation.css The navigation area is meant to be generated automatically and supports a certain number of links that can appear there. These links are named: Home, Reviews, Compare, Articles, Blog, and Forum. There are NOT supposed to be any other links on this navigation bar. If you want to add links you will have your work cut out for you. Review Site is designed to look great coming out of the box. For this to be the case, CSS is used to constuct the navigation bar and it is precisely specified to the pixel. If you try to change this CSS you will likely screw things up. It is not recommended that you add additional links. And don't ask me how to do it. The literal solution is to go hire a CSS expert and have them redesign the navigation bar.
How do I change the colors on public pages?Review Site is heavily CSS based and is not designed in such a way that you can just modify a single color variable and have the templates automatically accept the changes. If you really want to edit the CSS for Review Site you can, but unless you are a CSS expert, expect that your changes will degrade the quality of the pages. So why is it so hard to modify the styling? The answer to this is very simple, as a web developer I can offer two alternatives to styling. I can offer a highly configurable styling solution, where you can edit the colors of everything. But to achieve this I can't add any background images. So the styling is going to be VERY plain and unattractive. I have adopted this approach in Review Foundry. I am constantly asked why the interface looks so plain. The other possibility is to offer CSS styling with background images. When you do this, the color scheme must match the background images, so you cannot offer configurable colors and expect people to modify the colors in a way that doesn't completely destroy the harmony of the page. This is the approach taken with Review Site. The pages look good out of the box, but are not configurable. The way to fix this is to offer alternative skins - the entire CSS styling and the templates, is bundled into a skin, and you can swap between skins to select the look that you prefer. Presently there is only ONE skin in Review Site, the default skin. If anyone should create and entirely new skin and want to share it with others, contact me and I will consider adding it to the distribution. Having said that Review Site skins are not configurable as regards colors, that is not entirely true. You do have some control over the coloring of elements seen on the Product Comparison page. If you really need to change some of the colors here, go to the Configure > Comparisons page and see what's available.
How do I ADD a displayed field?In order to add a new field to a template you first need to ensure that there is a corresponding column in the table responsible for detailing the thing being displayed (be it a Review or an Article). Adding a column requires more discussion than can be afforded in an FAQ response, so see the relevant section on UNDERSTANDING REVIEW RECORDS and UNDERSTANDING ARTICLE RECORDS. Both of these pages specifically address the question of how to add new columns to the respect tables and how to modify the templates to display the new data. This will entail some understanding of the Smarty templating system.
How do I REMOVE a displayed field?In order to remove existing columns from the tables see the section on Deleting Existing Fields. Once you have removed a column from a table you might have to edit the corresponding template to remove any residual HTML associated with the column. However, in most cases the residual HTML is not displayed if there is no column value to go along with it.
Can I dispense with thumbnail images?You do not have to use either product thumbnails or the full size version of a product image in Review Site. If you do not add the relevant product image to the /images/product directory, then the missing image should not affect the way the product information is laid out.
How can I create a Buy Now Button?This is an affiliate review site application, so you are expected to create affiliate links using the Review.product_url column. However, for the sake of discussion, let's say you are interested in placing a "buy now" button on the page. If you visit the review.tpl template you will see Smarty code for adding plain hypertext links that go through the jump script that converts the destination URL into an affiliate link. That particular piece of Smarty templating code looks like this: <a [% if $review.jump_url %] href="[% $review.jump_url %]" target="_blank" [% else %] href="[% $review.review_url %]" [% /if %] ><h2>[% $review.product_name %]</h2></a> If an affiliate link is available the visitor is directed through the jump script to the vendor site. If an affiliate link is not available, the visitor gets directed to the product review page. The jump script looks exactly like the URL to the product detail page on your site, but with the string /review replaced with the string /recommends. So you have to look hard to see the difference between the two URLs. Visitors will typically end up on the web site of the vendor before they get to see the review on your site, unless they specifically click on the big buttons that say READ REVIEW. If you wish to replace any of those plain jump script links with code that represents a button you should study the section of the review.tpl template that is responsible for adding a READ REVIEW button to each of the product summaries on the page that lists the first few products. That should indicate to you how buttons are handled in Review Site. It does require some CSS styling, and the corresponding styling for the buttons can be found in the /css/style.css template. So you will need to summon up your CSS mastery to get the job done. Don't ask me to do it for you. I simply don't have the time for such requests. How Do I Make Review Foundry Appear On My Homepage?This question is covered in detail in the earlier section Public Pages: Putting Review Site On Your Homepage so you may have seen this already. How do I Upgrade?Review Site is so simple in construction that it is not really meant to be developed much further. But who knows? Assume for now that if you install you shouldn't need to upgrade the distribution. If you do need to upgrade it in the future, the upgrade process should be detailed in the QUICK_INSTALL file. But here is the general upgrade process: Download the latest version of the software and then look for all the UPGRADE files in the /cgi-bin/rs directory. Also consult the QUICK_INSTALL file for generic upgrade instructions (read that first). In essence you replace /cgi-bin/rs/_lib and /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/do and keep everything else, then modify templates to get new functionality if there is any (in which case see the latest UPGRADE file for instructions). If there are a number of UPGRADE files that you need to go through (because you have ignored keeping up with upgrades), then I recommend you just go through the relevant upgrade files and only make the TABLE modifications that are called for (any missing tables will be added during the upgrade). Ignore the called for template changes. Then run the installer in upgrade mode. Afterwards, replace all existing templates in your current /cgi-bin/rs/foundry/my/skins/ directory with the new set of templates. Then edit the ones you need to in order to get back the custom look you had before (if you made any template modifications in the past). That's the approach I take, because I am lazy and I always want to do the least amount of work. How do I move my Review Site installation to another server?If you decide at some stage that you need to move your Review Site installation from one server to another and take all your data with you the procedure requires a little care. We will assume here that you are copying your RS files from the old server to the new and are not re-installing from scratch (by running the RS installer). So you would be copying across all the CGI-related files (minus the .tar files associated with an install) in /cgi-bin/rs There are also image files, documentation, and PHP files stored in the /rs directory of your document root. You should be sure to copy across everything in there too. Let's suppose you have copied these files to the new location. The next thing to consider is the matter of paths in the executable Perl scripts of the program (the administrative portion). When you first installed Review Site the main executable script at /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/do/admin/admin.cgi had path information to the Review Site perl modules written to the top of it. If the new installation will be in the same absolute location as on the old server then all is good. Otherwise you will need to edit those paths in the admin.cgi script. Generally there are 3 lines containing path info at the top of such executable Perl files. You do NOT need to look anywhere else in the file for other path info to correct. Just those few lines at the very top. If your database parameters on the new system have changed, compared to the old server, you will need to hand edit the configuration file that contains database connection parameters. You will find this file duplicated (a Perl and PHP version) at these locations: /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/my/defs/database.def /rs/reviewsite/my/database.php Open these files up in a text editor. Be careful editing them. The content is in the form of either a Perl hash or a PHP hash, and if you invalidate the structure of the hash the file will not be read properly when the program starts up. Just replace, as necessary, the values for the MySQL hostname, database name, username, and password in both files. In practice, when you edit MySQL database parameters in the administrative portion of Review Site, these values are stored in separate Perl and PHP files used by the back end and front end of the application respectively. Next, you will of course need to copy the RS tables across to the new server. You will need to do a MySQL dump of all Review Site tables on your old server and re-import them on the new one. The best bet here is to use the mysqldump command line utility that MySQL provides and simply create one file containing the SQL statements for all tables. Next step. All of the RS configuration information resides in /cgi-bin/reviewsite/my and in /rs/reviewsite/my (including templates) which you have by this stage copied across too. However path info in the configuration file: /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/my/Reviewsite/ConfigData.pm will need to be altered to reflect the new environment. So open up that file in a text editor and look for paths and URLs that reflect the old server and not the new one, and change those variables (for example site_document_root_url, but others too). Once you have edited the file, visit the Configure > Paths / URLs page and save the page. This will force the PHP version of the configuration values to be updated as well. Don't forget to do that! Finally, there are a couple of directories which store compiled Perl Template Toolkit templates (files with .html extensions) which would have the wrong URLs/paths in them, so while these directories should exist on the new server, they need to be EMPTY (so delete any files in them if you copied those files across): /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/perl /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/do/admin/templates/compiled There are corresponding PHP Smarty directories that should also be initially emptied on your new server. Delete file from the following directories: /rs/reviewsite/my/smarty/cache /rs/reviewsite/my/smarty/compiled /rs/reviewsite/my/smarty/configs That's it. If you followed all the instructions above your RS install is probably functional again. If not, reread the section above in case you missed a step. Then, if you are still having problems, send the relevant error message my way and I'll tell you what the likely culprit would be. How can I put up a Contact Form?A Contact Us page is already built into the program. Look for the Contact Us link at the bottom of all public pages. How can I create a Google Site Map File?I have placed a Perl script in your /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/do/admin directory named sitemap.pl which, when run from the command line, generates a site map file in the format that Google can use to index your Review Site pages. Run this script to confirm that it creates a sitemap.xml file in your root PHP Review Site directory (where the index.php script is found). You run the script with this command line invocation: perl sitemap.pl If you have the Perl class Compress::Zlib installed on your server, a gzip-compressed version of the site map will also be created, named sitemap.xml.gz Note, however, that there's really no need to make a gzip-compressed version available for Google because your site map file is going to be relatively small anyway. So if you don't have Compress::Zlib available, don't worry, just point Google at the regular uncompressed sitemap.xml file. Rerun the sitemap.pl script any time that you make modifications to your Review Site records and need to update your site map file (which Google downloads every week or so). Of course, you'll have to alert Google to the fact that you have a sitemap file that it should consult. See Google Webmaster Tools for more information on sitemaps. Next Section: ABOUT THE SMARTY TEMPLATE SYSTEM « Table of Contents | Obtain Review Site » Copyright © 2008 Random Mouse Software. All Rights Reserved. |