I have always been a Microsoft girl, but open source is not something that you can ignore, so I am trying to learn some PHP. Below is a really good article on installing Apache and PHP.
How to Install and Configure PHP 5 to Run with Apache on Windows
I started a blog about my company, hosted on our own server. Prior to this I have zero knowledge on blogging and being a forum adminstrator so I just downloaded from wordpress.org. I also wanted to start a forum at that time and apparently phpBB3 is being recommended, so I installed that too.
Few months later I feel it’s kinda weird to have different feel on both the blog and the forum, because I don’t know how to code in php and css, so I can only rely on downloaded stuffs. I found out I can always start new posts in the blog, but I feel lazy or pretty reluctant to go to the forum at a separate link with a different feel on phpBB3.
That is when I start to think about integrating both wordpress and phpBB3. I wanted my blog to be the main page, with phpBB3 in one of the pages. Some recommended the frame, but it’s not so nice with scroll bars. Some wordpress plugins only integrates the forum posts. WP-United seems like the only solution. It looks kinda complex with lots of steps, and I finally took the plunge to try it. I made backups for the blog and phpBB and started to follow the steps to install wp-united, using the Automod. All seems ok until the DIY section, where I was instructed to run wpu-install.php. I know certain folders are missing from the error so I copy the folder at the root directory. In the end I can’t solve this problem of Fatal Error at dbal.php at line 654. This file is not under wp-united folder at all and I know nothing about php codes. I fiddled for few hours and just gave up, and uninstalled the mod, and revert to my backup copies. Then I went back to my phpBB3 and found out the styles had gone back to the default style and I can’t change it back to the style that was before. So I deactivated all styles and left with the one style that I wanted, and finally got the style that I wanted. But then my whole forum and posts can’t be seen from the main phpBB3 page! But when I checked in the ACP, all my forum and posts are there. I feel exasperated because I do not know how to fix this and I am afraid that more problems will pop up. That was when I decided that I will take the whole phpBB3 down, and opted for a wordpress plugin forum. Simple Press Forum is the wonderful plugin that I used and when I installed it, there were a few errors that I can’t create table or something, but when it ended, I can see the Forum tab with all the settings. Strange. I got errors during installation, the Forum shouldn’t work rite? But somehow it did.
So now I will have to apologize to the users of my phpBB3 board, but I think it’s ok because my phpBB3 board is pretty deserted anyway.
I am still trying my best to familiarize myself with Simple Press Forum, and I hope I can get the forum running very soon in my WordPress blog.
Here is a million thanks to WordPress, Simple Press Forum and phpBB3, although I took my phpBB3 board down. Open source seems like the way to go, I am sorry I am a slave of Microsoft, hope I can learn some of the Open Source stuffs soon…
I have been telling my boss since a year ago that our company should put our business on the WWW, aka WORLD WIDE WEB, but he seemed nonchalant about it at that time.
FYI, my company is the number 1 company in its field that I can’t tell you now but I know I will in the future, you might even catch it between the lines, Ooops!
All my company has is XXXX.com (XXXX is masked… ), and the website is like ancient, and you probably wont even look past the first paragraph. The info is scarce and incomplete, boring choice of words (I absolutely love wordpress’s little cute words that they used), and the graphics is so OMG-horrible. My company website is done by an external website developer company, and if I were the marketing department manager, I would have fired them long long time ago. I feel their design is really horrendous and any 12-year-old could do that design and layout, no offense to 12-year-olds, pls.
Anyway I have complained that to my boss with regards to the current website design, and he said it’s our corporate image. Yeah probably our corporate image is dull and boring, but shouldn’t the external consultant be responsible to style it up?
Why has this post become a complain on the website design? Darn.
Anyway, my company has only a basic website that probably wasn’t updated since hundred of years ago, I have told my boss that we should start with e-commerce, blog and forum,etc since our company is considered as a ICT company. Imagine an ICT company without a strong web presence… Unthinkable! It’s like a bus driver who can’t drive a car! Weird example over there…
OK, so now my boss is very gungho about these right now because the conventional method of business can only take you to one place and won’t get you further. So now suddenly he’s so tech-savvy and starts to talk about the web to our senior managements, and he said we will be hiring consultants, send us peasants to courses to build up on our web knowledge. I said, hello why are you doing all these? We already know how, just google it, no need to waste money on greedy consultants and useless courses that charge exorbitantly.
I am just glad my boss has finally realized, kudos to him.
