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A page about the page itself

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This is the title of this website, which is found multiple times in the website itself.

This site uses a completely made-from-scratch CMS, using PHP and MySQL ... I may open-source it, but not until after I'm a bit more satisfied with the particular set of features I've got.

I am heavily inspired, in terms of both design and design philosophy, by a previous design of the website of Sam Hughes, creator of How To Destroy The Earth. I wouldn't have been able to make this site if it hadn't been for the hours I spent poring over his CSS files (yes, I have permission to "borrow" the design), tearing my hair out over the fact that you can't make columns of equal height in IE unless the fixed-width column comes after the "rest of the page"-width column in the markup, nor a floating menu-bar (like the one in the standard stylesheet for this very website) unless it comes first in the markup ...1

Pages in "A page about the page itself" [RSS feed]

Some features

Standard stuff for a CMS ... you can add new pages, edit them, and delete them without leaving the comfort of your web broswer. It currently supports precisely one login username/password. You can update your password and email address in a control panel. Email address is used for the contact page, which can be enabled or disabled.

Pages exist on a tree-structure, because I'm not currently confident enough to try to make a system for going by tags instead, or indeed for searching for combinations of tags. All page-names are unique, so that you can just go to http://ihaveawebsite.org/?p=foo, instead of having to go to all the trouble of doing http://www.ihaveawebsite.com/?p=alice/bob/baz/bar/foo if you have file "foo" under the "bar" directory, which in turn is under "baz", under "bob", under "alice" ... Then there's the title, the "parent" page ... You can change the order of pages as they appear in the sidebar or "list of sub-pages", and you can choose whether the children pages are listed in order from newer to older or vice versa.

A page can be hidden from users who aren't logged in; upon removing "hidden" status, it will optionally2 appear to non-logged-in users as if you'd only just created it. Logged in users will still be able to see the original creation time. There's an option for whether not-logged-in users will be able to see that the "hidden" page exists (with a header that can be changed), or if it will show up as if the page never existed in the first place (which is more secure).

Incidentally, the "not found" error checks to see if the file exists in the filesystem but not in the database, or vice versa.

All options for the site are adjustable by directly modifying the file options.php (planned: changing this by a page as well), and all pages can be altered in any reasonable way through the CMS itself.

Oh yes — as you can see, you can also specify a custom header for a page. You can specify extra content in the <head> portion, as well as PHP to be evaluated prior to any output, on both a per-header and per-page basis.

There's also an RSS feed for newly-added and newly-edited pages, as well as comments. Comments have a whole buch of options, starting with what HTML-tags are allowed. A page can have an autoclose system; you specify a certain amount of time (i.e. "45 days"; something PHP can interpret, i.e. "45 days"), and comments will automatically be closed that length of time after it was last modified or after the last comment (whichever is later).

1If you have no idea what all this means, I recommend spending at least a month learning CSS and HTML. Okay, this is probably an exaggeration, but ...

2Optional-ness was added after I discovered I'd accidentally set one of the Touhou comics hidden, and I didn't want them to appear out of order.

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