Updated 2006-07-16
The Grand Fandango is a suite of PHP components designed to make life as a website developer easier. At present, it includes a what's new box, a what's updated box, a breadcrumbs tool, a navigation menu tool, a datestamp, and a sitemap. The aim is to provide all these components in a form that is easy to "drop-in-and-go" for non-programmers.
userinfo.php, gfFunctions.php, and
rssbutton.gif have to reside in the root directory - the others
can be wherever you like in your website directory structure.userinfo.php file to reflect your own details. All
instructions are contained within the file./grandfandango, you would use something like this:
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/grandfandango/breadcrumbs.php"); ?>
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/grandfandango/navigation.php"); ?>
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/grandfandango/whatsnew.php"); ?>
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/grandfandango/whatsupdated.php"); ?>
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/grandfandango/sitemap.php"); ?>
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/grandfandango/datastamp.php"); ?>
/grandfandango, you would place in the
<head> section of your page:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/grandfandango/grandfandango.css" />
<div class="box">
<?php include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . "/grandfandango/whatsnew.php"); ?>
</div>
Lots! The What's new and What's updated box cache their results, checking hourly for site changes. They also produce an RSS 1.0 feed, allowing you to syndicate your content and letting other people monitor when your site is updated. The Site Map also caches its results and updates every hour. The navigation tool is not a static page, either: it's aware of what part of the site your users are in, and expands and contracts accordingly. The best way to see this in action is to visit www.alexpounds.com and play with the navigation tool there.
If you want another feature added, I'd probably be amenable to it. Email alex@alexpounds.com with your requests.
Yes. You can use some custom tags to help control these files. There are 3
tags: <alexpounds:new />, <alexpounds:noList />,
and <alexpounds:menu />.
<alexpounds:new /> lets you notate that the file is considered to be a "new"
file - it should appear in the "What's new?" box. On most Unix filesystems
there is no creation time stored, so this is the most reliable way of knowing
when something's new (we could store details and watch for modification times,
but I'm of the opinion that that's overkill). If this tag is not included then
the file will appear in the "What's updated?" box. This tag also affects the
date stamp component. New files are given as "Added 2004-02-15" where updated
files are given as "Updated 2004-02-15".
<alexpounds:noList /> allows you to indicate that the file should not show up in
any of the components. This is useful for headers and footers, custom functions,
and so on. Please note the breadcrumbs and the date stamp ignore this tag.
If you want to ignore a directory, create an empty file called "alexpounds.noList"
in that directory.
<alexpounds:menu name="Example name" /> allows you to specify a shorter title
for usage in the components. The name attribute is mandatory. For instance, your
page might be titled "The albatrosses of Ipanema and their amazing guitar
solos", but you would prefer this to appear as "Albatrosses and guitars" in your
navigation.
These tags have to be placed in the first 20 lines of your file, otherwise they
will be ignored. I advise you to put them just after your <html> tag. They
should be placed in comments to avoid validation problems, unless you're serving
XHTML as application/xhtml+xml there's a DTD for these tags at
http://www.alexpounds.com/code/alexpounds.dtd. If you don't know what this
means, don't worry, it's not important.
The Grand Fandango is licensed under the GNU General Public License. See the file COPYING for details.
Panic. Once you've finished panicing, prepare as much information as you can (what you were doing, how to reproduce the bug, what you changed, what happened that wasn't supposed to, what didn't happen that was supposed to, and so on) about it and email alex@alexpounds.com.
You might like to check The Grand Fandango's home page for updates first.
There's an announcement mailing list available from The Grand Fandango's home page. Emails will only be sent when there's a new release of The Grand Fandango and your address won't be shared with anyone else.
Great! I love getting feedback. My contact details are on the website.
I hope you find The Grand Fandango useful. If you do, please tell your friends all about it and link back to alexpounds.com.