Upgraded from PHP 5.2 to 5.3. This stopped the perl hit counter from working. Implemented a PHP hit counter in the ssi folder which seems to do the trick nicely.
On upgrade, the blog was inaccessible, but I just had to reset the password for some reason.
Upgraded the control panel so that the form will automatically look for any file in the /img directory that starts with “Frame” and will include that as an option for the bottom decoration. This uses the glob function to read the matching files into an array.
Added Show/Hide doodles link to home page using the javascript technique described here.
Created and installed the little town doodles, the watching face doodle, and coffee cup stains on home page using free Photoshop brushes found on the net.
Added ‘Control Panel‘, using cookies to control appearance of the web page.
Learned that setcookie command must be used before any html tag, even before the head tag. Cookies set on a page cannot be used on that page, since the page has already been rendered. However, if you use a variable to set the cookie, you can use the variable on the current page.
Moved the navigation menu under the content for compatibility with Opera Browser which faithfully layered the sub-menu under the content, making the sub-menu inaccessible. Seems to be the only browser that obeys layers!
Created a header.htm include file which contains common style sheet references and HTML <head> code. Updated all php files to ‘include’ the header.htm, replacing most of the <head> information in each file. All php files are now devoid of repetitive content to the greatest extent possible.
Renamed footer.php to footer.htm for consistency and updated all php files calling it.
I finally found the answer to including the global banner, footer, and menu the files into the Gallery2 templates. As it turns out, it is possible to embed php code into smarty templates. So, it’s easy to include the normal global files like so:
{php}
include(‘../ssi/Footer.php’);
{/php}
With that, the visual integration of the photography gallery is complete!
The good news is that I figured out how to include a file in the Gallery template files.
{g->theme include=”Main_Menu.htm”}
The bad news is that I have not figured out how to include a file outside the Gallery directories. Therefore, I cannot use the same files for the banner, nav, and footer that I use in the rest of the site. To change any of these, I would need to edit 2 files instead of one.