Where's your blog???

Check it out: you can allow open registration by clicking the "allow new users to register" box on your settings tab in your back office. After someone registers you'll get an email, so you decide if you want them to post or not. If you do then you go in to your blogs tab and pick the blog you want them to be allowed on, then the permissions subtab, then check the boxes for the permissions you want them to have. I think you also have to go to the users tab and make them be at least level 1, but a bit of experimentation will show you how the whole thing works.

BTW to see 'secret' posts isn't very far off from that. Suppose I sign up for your blog and you want me to be able to post on blog 3 and read the secret stuff. Cool - you make me a member of blog 3. That will let me read your secret (which is really 'protected') stuff. You also give me permission to post drafts. I can't publish stuff yet because you only give me drafts, but that's cool. Eventually you figure out I'm a psychotic loon who writes funny stuff, so you give me permission to post published as well as draft. Ba da bing - now I can post stuff and you don't have to intervene anymore.

After you get an idea of that whole shebang check out the Plugins page, linked up above in the gray band, for groovy whizbangs you can do to supplement and further control aspects of the multi-user environment.

Here's my blog. I followed your directions but don't know how to post the link to allow people to register. I'm not sure if I did it right. This is hard stuff.

Um... There's no link in your post. Most skins already have the links, but if you had the option turned off the register link won't show. How the function works is like this: "If the visitor is not logged in and registration is allowed then show them a 'register' link". Depends on your skin, and not all skins are equal in all regards.

Woo Hoo. I got the registeration thing figured out.. THANKS! Now I need to know how to add the note to the right that uses the following code.

Welcome to our family recipe<br>
site! There are some recipes <br />
here that only our family can <br />
see (Our Family Secrets!), so <br />
if you are family, be sure to <br />
<a href="http://www.creativewebsights.com/b2evolution/blogs/htsrv/register.php?redirect_to=%2Fb2evolution%2Fblogs%2Findex.php%3Fblog%3D2%26amp%3Bdisp%3Dposts">register</a> so you can see them...<p>
Enjoy!<p>

I'm not sure which file to put this in and what coding to wrap around it.

I'm using the plain skin. Is that the problem? THe register link comes up when I log out though.

How do I get the junk gone from the right side menu after the linkblog? I'm so new to all this PHP stuff. I understand .html but not this stuff. any help would be great.

Thanks

Jona

Slow down!!! It'll all work out pretty easy. First I want to show you how the guts of your blog work. Open up your skin's _main.php file in a plain text editor - not some fancyschmancy word processing thing. BTW that file will be found in the plain folder in the skins folder. skins/plain/_main.php is what you want. Now look for this up near the top:

				<a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="The blog front page">home</a>
      			<?php
				user_login_link( '', '' );
				user_register_link( '', '' );
				user_admin_link( '', '' );
				user_profile_link( '', '' );
				user_logout_link( '', '' );
			?>

The function "user_register_link() is what makes the register link show up when you're not logged in. The stuff inside the parentheses is feeding parameters to the actual function. In this case it's saying "the first and second parameters are empty". No biggie, but WTF are the first and second parameters? Check out http://doc.b2evolution.net/0.9.0/evocore/_blogs_b2evocore__functions_users_php.html#functionuser_register_link and you'll see they are 'before' and 'after'. You want to put text before and after that link, so you would do it like this:

user_profile_link( 'If you had any clue about how cool you could be you would ', ' with my blog and see all my secret stuff' );

The problem is that won't put the link over on the side like the site you were looking at. What they did was went to their blogs tab and edited their long description field to have what they wanted in there. You can't put php code in there, so they probably put exactly what you pasted above in their long description. It works, but I'm sure they see that even when they are logged in.

Make sense? Using the function gives you flexibility with when it shows up (because that's how the function works) and what goes before and after (because that's how the parameters work).

Oh wait a minute. They MIGHT have put the function in their sidebar instead of the long description field. In that case it won't show up when they are logged in. In fact they must have done it this second way because looking at the _main.php file for that skin doesn't show me where it has a long description box. They probably did something like this:

<div id="sidebar">
<div class="submenu">

<div class="postBox">
<?php user_register_link( 'Don\'t be lame! ', ' for my web and read secret stuff and maybe even write your own!!!', 'Sign up' ); ?>
</div>			

<?php 
						
	/**
	 * --------------------------- BLOG LIST INCLUDED HERE -----------------------------

Notice two things. I put a \ before my ' in the word "don't", and I added a third parameter to control the link text. You'll be able to see where I added a little bit between parts that are already in your _main.php file. Especially look for the "<div id="sidebar">" part and the "BLOG LIST INCLUDED HERE".

It gets kinda complex to just say "do this do that", so spend some time sort of looking at your _main.php file and see if the flow of things makes sense. You'll be able to piece it all together when you start seeing words that show up on your blog in your skin. Plus the comments help a lot.

Have fun with it! It's totally flexible, but you do have to get used to how it does it's thing before you can make it do your thing.

Mine doesn't look like yours.

This is what mine looks like:

<div class="bSideItem">
<h3><?php echo T_('Misc') ?></h3>
<ul>
<?php
user_login_link( '<li>', '</li>' );
user_register_link( '<li>', '</li>' );
user_admin_link( '<li>', '</li>' );
user_profile_link( '<li>', '</li>' );
user_logout_link( '<li>', '</li>' );
?>
</ul>
</div>

I just really need some help with this to get my site up and running. It's all too frustrating right now.

I downloaded the plain skin and opened the files - that's where I got what I pasted. Never used the skin or saw it's guts before.

The same general things apply. What you pasted shows that you have "<li>" before your register link, and "</li>" after it. You can add text by changing it to "<li>This is text before " and " and a little text after</li>", but you will have to understand how your _main.php is making the whole page in order to move that bit to the place you want it.

Got link?

DO you suggest another skin?

Nope. You can, but you'll end up in pretty much the same situation: to make a skin be to your liking you have to edit at least one file. Usually it's _main.php, and often you will want to edit yourstylesheet.css (though it's not called that - name could be anything depending on your skin).

_main handles most of "what's on your page". The css file handles most of the "how it looks".

You want to customize what's on your page (some text before and after the 'register' link), so you've pretty much got to edit the _main file. Have you tried it at all? Everything you do you will be able to undo, so it's not like you'll lose anything. Where you have

user_register_link( '<li>', '</li>' );

change it to this:

user_register_link( '<li>before ', ' after</li>' );

Next try this:

user_register_link( '<li><strong>before</strong> ', ' after</li>' );

Here's one that might even look good:

user_register_link( '<li>', '</li><li>Registered members may be authorized to post</li>' );

That stuff will work in ANY skin, but it depends on exactly *where* in your skin's _main file the "user_register_link( '<li>', '</li>' );" is to know if it will actually look good.

Just so you both know, the Register link is at the top of the page in Plain.