| CODE |
Extend-A-Story is an interactive, extendable, choose your own adventure story. It is written in PHP and is designed to work with a MySQL database. Here are the basic steps needed to get Extend-A-Story working on your site with just one story: - Set up a MySQL database to store the Extend-A-Story data. - In the new database, run the database creation script 'ExtendAStory.sql'. - Take the contents of the www directory and place them in a directory accessible to your web server. - Modify db.php to contain the relevant login information for the database you created. - Point your browser to <story root>/admin.php and login as the administrator: - Login Name : admin - Password : change-me - !!! CHANGE THE PASSWORD OF THE ADMIN ACCOUNT !!! - Click on the 'Configure Story Settings' link and change the story configuration to suit your site: - Story Name : The name of the story. - Site Name : The name of your site. - Story Home : URL for the home page of the story. - Site Home : URL for your site. - Read Episode URL : URL leading to the PHP script that displays episodes: 'read.php'. This is sent out in emails from Extend-A-Story to authors letting them know when episodes they have written have been extended. - Admin Email : The email address for the administrator of this story. All email sent from Extend-A-Story is sent from this address. Also, this address receives email every time an episode is created. Extend-A-Story will send no email if this is not set. - Is Writeable : When set to 'Yes', the story is open and people can write episodes. When set to 'No', the story is closed and people cannot write episodes. People can still read episodes that have been written. - Max Links : The maximum number of links that can lead off from a particular episode. - Max Edit Days : The maximum number of days that an author will be allowed to edit an episode after they have created it. Moderators are not affected by this. - Create a home page for the story with links pointing to the various features of Extend-A-Story that you want people to have access to. You may want to delete the PHP scripts for features that you don't want to use. The PHP scripts offering various features are as follows: - read.php : Read the story. Provide a link to this script to start the reader at the very beginning of the story. - statistics.php : Displays a count of the created episodes, empty episodes, and total episodes. - search.php : Allows various ways to search for episodes. If you want to remove this functionality, be sure to delete 'results.php' as well. - story-tree.php : Provides a listing of which episodes are available at various levels of depth within the story. - admin.php : Grants access to the administration and moderator functionality. - list-locked.php : Displays all episodes that are currently locked for creation. - Create the first episode. When you first set up the database, no episodes exist. Create the first episode to start the story and verify that everything is working. If you properly set up your AdminEmail setting, you should receive email notifying you of the newly created episode. - Take the contents of the docs directory and place them in a directory accessible to your web server. These HTML pages are the documentation for the users of Extend-A-Story. Be sure to link to them from your site. If you want to set up multiple stories, you follow the same directions as above, but bear in mind the following: - Each story will need its own database. - Each story will need its own separate directory with a copy of the PHP scripts. |