The Peak Cottage

You made it!!! Hello Siteseed Hello Siteseed

Welcome to Siteseed!

Thank you for installing the software on your machine. During the instalation proccess default layouts for articles were created, as well as a sample interface setup. You will find lots of tricks in the default setup (sample forum configuration, search engine, as well user login and registration forms). Most important you can get a close look on how sites are created under Siteseed, what objects are objects (in both dinamic and static formats) are used, how they are called from the Interface program and how to make use of objects to isolate pieces of code (both PHP and HTML).

Siteseed is not meant to be a easy tool to setup. It is meant to be powerfull. Take your time to read the manual, search for FAQ´s and more help in the Siteseed project homepage.

There is a support mailling list that you should probably join. Also you can create a login in the FAQ´s site and participate in the Forums if you find the web interface more convienient. Those are only place where some support is given by other users and the program authors.

FAQ´s site (just follow the link, create an account and have fun)

The mailling list is called siteseed@mrnet.pt. You can join in by sending a message to majordomo@mrnet.pt with the following text on the first line of the message body: subscribe siteseed@mrnet.pt your_email@here.

Best wishes,
The hackers that made this project possible

What do I do now? Hello Siteseed Hello Siteseed

Does this login and search box work on the default setup?

Yes they do. Login with user "test" and password "test" and check what happens.

Afterwards search for a single letter in the search box ('a' will do fine).

Both the search engine facilities and the login management are quite easy to setup in Siteseed.

Can you get to your backoffice?

First of all check your backoffice (at http://your_server/this_site/bo). If you are prompted for a password (assuming you did setup one during the install procedure) all is going well. Otherwise you will receive a message stating that your webserver is ignoring the .htaccess file.

The .htaccess file is the apache web server way of protecting directories. You must ensure that your web server protects the backoffice, otherwise anyone would be able to control Siteseed, and bad things would eventually happen. Read the web server documentation carefully about "access controls" and "basicauth". The same applies to any web server you may be using. Siteseed relies on the web server for the backoffice security.

I can see the backoffice. What should I do to explore Siteseed?

Siteseed is a complex system. As everything else it becomes simpler to use once you get to know it well. Let's start with a quick tour over the main components:

Get to the "Technical Staff" menu and click on "Interface -> Edit". Pick the default interface. Here goes all the Interface macro structure. The main table that splits most of the screen area is visible, along with a very small part of the HTML that forms the page. Also there a a lot of calls to "object/show.php". These calls remove complex objects from the interface, making it somewhat simpler to understand and change the Interface code.

Click on "Menu" (top bar of the backoffice) and go to the "Publishers" menu. Select "Objects -> Edit" to get a list of objects. Notice that some of them correspond to the ones included on the Interface model. Enter some of the objects, press "View HTML" to check their code. Most objects have just HTML. These are static objects. The "Interface - search box" object is a dinamic object (and as such has PHP code also). Now go back to the Interface model and check for the different call that is made when refering to a dynamic object (with $evalme=1).

Objects and Interface models makeup the core Siteseed programming structures. Objects can be called from various Interfaces (there are no limits to the number of simultaneous Interfaces and Objects you can have on your website) and help isolate HTML/PHP code segments. This two structures are the only ones in Siteseed were PHP is evaluated. All others are HTML and MACRO based.

To find a bit about macros check out the "Technical Staff" option "Visual Components -> Layout". Look at the macro table (right side column) and the Layout programs available. These macros '$macro_name$' are used to define how your article related structured are rendered on screen. HTML is used to format the output.

Layouts are rendered (optionally) on top of "boxes" (which you will find on "Technical Staff" -> "Technical Staff" -> "Boxes". However they can be used alone (i.e. you could draw the boxes mixed with the macros on a Layout). You will find the "boxed" and "layout" used to render this article with ease on each list.

Boxes and Layouts are the core elements of the rendering engine. You can have as many of both as you like, there are no limits in Siteseed for any of them.

These are the four most important Siteseed structures. Understanding them well and how they can be mixed provides the tools for building most sites. Other structures are used to define what components make up an article, subjects under which articles can be classified and grouped, user maintenance, forms and surveys. Hit the manual, play around and have fun with Siteseed.