Poll Module

Olivier can you attach your poll module here ?

I try to make it run on 5.1.10.

Is someone can make a summury of template to change (I found a lot of infos here but some .tpl's name changed so i'm a little lost)

Maybe it could be a good idea to open a new Thread for 5.1 releases.

Thx

Done see:
[www.phorum.org]

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Amilcar Lucas
www.kdevelop.org webmaster

This is my first post. Im new to PHP and MySQL. Ive been working through Larry Ullmans book on the subjects and doing the tutorials. Im vaguely aware that Phorum is a php based forum software. What im wondering (and im sure this is the wrong place for the question, plight of the noob) Is where do you use the acual php code? I know its made with a text editor, but then what? Ive gotten further into the mysql acually making a few databases and extracting random information, but I cant mentally visualize where the php acually goes. Is the script opened in some sort of program? A good website on the subject or book would be great, cause right now the idea of PHP is very abstract.

domonkoss@yahoo.com
thanks ahead of time.

PHP scripts the stuff you open in a text editor containing the php commands, variables etc. are interpreted by a PHP command interpreter, a program that runs usually on a webserver.

So basically you put a php script to a webserver, tell the webserver that script.php file should be handled with a php interpreter and then you point your browser to the php-script.

I suggest you read for example wikipedias entry on php [en.wikipedia.org] or php's homepage for more info.

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-=[ Panu ]=-

Thanks panu. Also I went back in my php book and saw a small paragraph I must of missed or skipped saying you can use Dreamweaver for php scripts, something that would of really cleared things up had I read it. So Im just gonna focus on learning php and dreamweaver now, then try to branch into mysql. One more question though, my brother who worked in dreamweaver in school tells me he never learned any PhP and its unecesarry for web design, can anyone tell me why knowing php is important in the field?

thanks again.

It's unnecessary for web design, but let him try writing a forum website without using PHP and he'll stumble hard and hit his nose.

It's two different things, although in their technical use closely related. On one side there is HTML/JavaScript/CSS, which is all you need to write the code to make a site work in the browser. On the other side there are programming/scripting languages, most noticeably PHP, which can be used to generate dynamic content for web sites. PHP scripts can produce HTML, JavasScript and CSS so to say.

Graphically it's something like this (an arrow stands for "produces"):

         Human on                                  Human on any kind of
        Dreamweaver                                 test editor (e.g.
      (e.g. your bro)         Human on any      your friendly neighbourhood
              \            kind of text editor        Phorum hacker)
               \             (e.g. my wife)                  |
                \                  |                         |
                 \                 |                         |
                  \                v                         v
                   +----> HTML / Javascript / CSS <--- PHP scripting code
                               website pages

Note: As you can see, learning Dreamweaver is also unnecessary for web design.

Whether it's important for you to learn PHP and MySQL depends totally on what you want to achieve. If you never want to write any scripting code to simplify, automate or coolify parts on your web pages, then there's little use in learning it.

Since you're on the Phorum site though, I suspect that you want to work with Phorum. In that case, it can be good to know at least the basics of PHP coding, so you can take the existing code and tweak it to let it become what you want it to be. Learning SQL can be useful in case you want to retrieve some statistical information from Phorum's database or if you have to use some manual SQL query to fix a certain problem. In general, one can say that knowing some PHP/MySQL, makes working with other people's scripts a lot easier and less scary.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

And by learning to use Dreamweaver doesn't help you to learn html (or php, or javascript or CSS for that matter) learning to use Dreamweaver makes you know how to use DW to produce html etc. nothing else.

DW doesn't magically create php code for you, probably the book meant that a php-file can be opened and edited in DW. But you still need to know how to code.

I have said this before, but let me repeat. To really learn something you have to understand what is happening. DW and other visual editors mostly hide the more complex things from the user (tht's partly the reason for their existence).

So instead of dw use notepad (or other superior text editors like Jedit, Notepad2 [www.flos-freeware.ch] or something) and start from simple pages. Understand why something looks like it does.

By starting with plain html helps you to skip table based layout shithole and you can start directly with css... Good luck

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-=[ Panu ]=-