You may want to change the look and feel of phpYellow Pages. Make a backup copy before working on any file. Here are major Customization topics:
These are some of the files you may change to effect the look and feel you want:
phpYellow Pages is capable of showing any combination of data you wish. If the data is contained within the database, then the data may be displayed in a record. phpYellow Pages can show different data based on the rank of any listing. Ranks may be Basic, Preferred, or First Page. showOneRecord.php is the central switching file which determines which file is rendered based on the rank of a listing. It is used for EVERY user initiated search. The file showOneRecord.php conditionally shows:
showOneRecord.php is just a small file. Open it up, take a look, and you will see the logic of how records are displayed in every user initiated search.
The Standard Edition does not recognize and does not use ranks for listings in searches. Accordingly, one file is used to show results for user initiated searches - oneRecord.php. This file can be modified to suit your taste. Using plain HTML or php you can show data or rearrange the look, or change color or font-size or font-family ... basically any change you want to make to customize how your records look you can make.
It is preferable to make as many changes as possible using an external style sheet. By making changes to the external style sheet you keep your content separate from the formatting (font, color, position and so on...). This in turn allows you to:
The more changes you make to the original php files the more work you are creating for yourself in the long term. Do yourself a favor and keep the content separate from the formatting - by learning how to use cascading style sheets. The Web Developer's Virtual Library has excellent resources for you to learn CSS styles.
phpYellow Pages is compliant with the W3C's HTML 4.0, which since 1997 has been recommending that you keep structure apart from formatting. For example, in a Heading 1 tag colored red, the heading tags will be in the html document, and the color for the heading will be in an external .css file. This makes it easy to make sitewide changes in formatting to every page, but at the cost of a learning curve for .css - well worth it! You may find .css tutorials online and contained within better html editors.
Netscape users will be familiar with display dysfunctionality in Netscape, especially in regard to W3C cascading style sheets. I am happy to report that Netscape 6 (and higher versions) do a tolerable job in supporting Level 1 CSS. Most (if not all) of phpYellow Pages only uses CSS Level 1, and most phpYellow Pages should display tolerably well in Netscape 6 or higher.
How to Optimize for Other Netscape BrowsersThe formatting for phpYellow Pages is driven with external cascading style sheets. There is also browser detection. When a user loads any page a javascript detects their browser and loads a .css file for that specific browser make. To change the look and feel for Netscape simply open netscape.css in any css editor and format this file to suit your tastes. You can have a totally different look and feel for Netscape visitors - and another for Internet Explorer visitors.
You can add more browser types by adding another case statement block and a related css file in the yellow.js script. Based on an analysis of website traffic most surfers use recent browser versions. You can add specific versioning if you want but the traffic that will use it will tend to be negligible ...
Parts of Version 2.24 and higher versions incorporate CMS Bridge middleware. This is useful if you are using a Nuke software product and want to integrate your Nuke copy with the phpYellow Pages application. See http://portal.dbserve.net/codeshare/cms_bridge.htm for instructions and information.
One of the ways to customize phpYellow is to make changes to the category values. For example, instead of offering a generic Yellow Page service, you may change all the category values to the type of service you wish to have an online directory for. You may want to build a directory just for Real Estate services in your city, or create a Tourism only directory, or a High Tech services directory for your state, or an Automobile Dealer directory in your country, or ... the potential is limited only by your imagination. To make such a change will dramatically specialize your phpYellow implementation and very possibly enable you to provide a UNIQUE service not offered elsewhere.
Specialized directories can be created by using the categories*.php files as found in the distribution package. To do so, change the filename containing the categories you want to "categories.php".
It's easy to customize the categories of products and services in phpYellow. Open up the file named categories.php in your html editor. Add, edit or remove one or more categories like this:
Replace each select list item with the value and value displayed to the user that you want. For example, within categories.php:
<option value="Air-Conditioning">Air Conditioning</option>
Above you may change the actual value of "Air-Conditioning" to, for example, "Education". Also remember to change the words between the begin and end of the <option> tags to "Education".
Upload the new categories.php file to your web server and that's all you need to do - if these changes are made before you go online with your phpYellow implementation.
In NO CIRCUMSTANCE should you change any php or selected code or variables when making these category option changes. Change the option values only. By making these changes you are merely altering the V A L U E S that get selected by the user and sent or searched from the database. Instead of storing generic Yellow page like values, you are storing specialized values for your particular implementation - for example all services and products relating to "Education", or "Internet Products and Services" - whatever your implementation is. Changing the values makes all the difference - everything else still works exactly the same way - it is the values that make the results different. Any developer can make these value changes by following the steps detailed above.
In PREMIUM version 2.22 and higher you may change the category of a listing using a point and click tool. This tool is called 'Set CKEY Parameters'. The listing expiry date, category, position, payment required and status may be changed. A pop up window reports the result of your selection and automatically closes in POPUPTIMEOUT milliseconds. You may set your own value for POPUPTIMEOUT in the util.php file.
For example, you can change a category submitted by the user for their listing from "Computer Software" to "Internet Products". To do so you need to note the ckey number stamped on the listing (obtained via any search), then use the number in the 'Set CKEY Parameters' admin tool as pictured above.
Changing provinces or countries is exactly the same as changing categories. Open up the provinces or countries file, make desired changes, save and upload to your web server.
The bare minimum requirements for any listing is email and password. If you wnat to make MORE data fields required then follow these steps:
To require certain data to be entered by the user:
You can build a link to point toward a specific record. The highlight feature is used to do so. Highlight selects a specific record number using the form:
http://www.yourDomain.com/phpYellow/yellowresult.php?goal=highlight&ckey=1
Change ckey to the value of your record. ckey may be located by completing any search and looking for " On correspondence quote ckey# ". By default this is found in each displayed listing. You may also find it by asking the webmaster. ckey is the unique database key for the category record. For example, when you submit a listing you have a single contact table record number, called yps. When you submit one or more category records each record has a unique number called ckey. The two tables are joined together as needed using a common id. A special script is programmed to find the ckey and display the related contact and category record on a page all by itself.
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After you create an account with Answerplus it is easy to use Answerplus in phpYellow Pages. To do so you open one file and change the CONSTANTS contained within it. Here's how - open phpYellow/util.php and :
Step 1: set the constant USEANSWERPLUS to a value of "yes"
Step 2: set the Answerplus Accounts
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