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Frequently Asked Technical Questions

Find answers to technical questions about FlatPress here. If you're looking for general FAQ about FlatPress, please see this page. And for answers to more specific technical questions, please see the Tips and guides page.

General technical questions

What is required to run FlatPress?

FlatPress 1.2.1 will happily run on any web server that supports PHP from 5.6 to 8.0.

(Note for future use: FlatPress 1.3 “Andante” will run on PHP 7.1 to 8.3 - and it'll need the PHP intl extension enabled.)

For best results (but not mandatory), the web server should also have a rewrite engine (such as mod_rewrite) enabled; this is needed by the PrettyURLs plugin to create, well, pretty URLs. Also, GDlib should be installed for the creation of image thumbnails.

Since all data is stored in files, no database is needed.

How to install FlatPress?

Installing FlatPress is very easy.

Are multiple users supported?

The short answer is no. FlatPress is a single user system by design.

You should better ask “can I have more than one user?”. In this case the answer is “yes, but it's not supported” :D

Actually, you can run the installer multiple times; if you choose a different username for each time you run the setup, the old user won't be deleted, and so you'll get one user for each time you run the setup.

The drawbacks in this are that every user has administrative powers and there is little or no checks on probable race conditions: for instance, if two you are editing two posts at the same time, strange things may happen: FP may for instance not show one of the posts (clean the cache from the Maintenance panel); if two of you are editing the same posts, the changes of the first to post will be probably lost, overwritten by the changes the other did (no fix for this at the moment).

I've lost my password!

Delete %%setup.lock from fp-content/, backup your fp-content/config/ if you heavily customized FlatPress and then restart setup (point to index.php or setup.php); once asked create a user with the same username of the old one and it will be overwritten. Restore your config/ dir backup once done.

How to backup my FlatPress blog?

There a three things you can do against data loss: Backup, backup, and: backup.
Fortunately, backing up your FlatPress blog is quite easy.

I've found a bug!

Please do not hesitate to contact the FlatPress team. You may do so on different ways:

FlatPress is an international project, so our preferred language is English. You might find fellow FlatPress users speaking your language on the forum, though :)

See also: https://www.flatpress.org/contact

BBCode

What is BBCode?

BBCode is a simple-to-understand markup language that allows you to maintain your blog without knowing about HTML. For a general overview, see bbcode.org. To learn which BBCode tags are implemented in FlatPress, see this wiki page.

How is BBCode implemented ?

Using the great class StringParser_BBCode by Christian Seiler.

Entries and pages

What is an entry?

A blog entry is one content entry of your blog. An entry has a publish date and may be commented by your readers.

What is a static page?

A static page is an entry completely unlinked from the normal blog entry flux and that can't be commented. Examples would be the “About” and the “Imprint” page.

Plugins

What is a Plugin?

In the FlatPress administration area → Plugin administration: Create new article (What is a plugin?).

Widgets

What is a widget?

A widget is a dynamic component displayed (depending on the theme and on your config) on a topbar, on the right sidebar (default), etc. With “dynamic component” we mean a plugin providing a special interface (the widget function) designed to print content on the page when called. We called them “widget” and not “blocks” because we see blocks as passive elements which just display content, while widgets (which are php-coded as the common plugins) can of course execute code. A widget can then provide more advanced functions than just displaying a list of links (for which I'd suggest the static+blockparser combo), you may for instance have a widget fetching a displaying an rss feed from an external web page. The only limit is what php can do :)

How do I add a new widget?

Screenshot of widget configuration in the admin area. Click to view in full size!Add the corresponding plugin both to the plugin list and to the widget list in the section and at the position you want it to go.

Widgets are organized in groups or bars; every bar can contain any number of widgets. These bars are then displayed on the theme using the special tag {widget pos=BAR} where BAR is the name of the bar.

Generally in themes you have one ore more predefined widget bars. Usually you have at least the right bar; a lot of themes display both the contents of the left and of the right bar even if they actually have one single column of widgets (they show them together, one group after the other).

To add a widget, just drag'n drop it from the right to the bar you wish it to appear. See screenshot on the right!

I have enabled a widget in the plugin panel but I don't see anywhere in my sidebars

As we said, Widgets are special plugins providing a widget function; by the way FlatPress does not know where you want it to appear, so, once a plugin widget is loaded, you should enable it in the widget panel as well (see the previous question).

Comments

FlatPress offers very effective mechanisms against spam comments. Preventively, as a first step, the commenter has to solve a simple math problem (Accessible Antispam Plugin) to be able to send his comment. However, if a spam bot has passed this first stage, you can either block all comments until they are approved or filter them using appropriate guidelines and/or have them checked by the Akismet service. Only then will this comment appear under your entry.

Approve comments

I have received an e-mail that a comment from me must be approved.

As of FlatPress 1.3 Andante, comments are blocked by the comment center plugin until you approve or delete them or change the policy.

How to handle spam comments?

To do this, go to Posts → Manage posts in the administration area. Now find the post that contains spam comments. Now copy the ID of the post (FlatPress 1.3 required). Now go to the comment center → Manage comments. Search for the post using the ID. You can now search for the comment, send it to Akismet and delete it.

Where can I get an Akismet API key?

FlatPress offers you the comment center and Akismet to effectively fend off spam comments. To be able to use the Akismet service, you need an Akismet API key. For personal websites and blogs, this API key is free of charge (personal). If your FlatPress blog is not personal, for example if it represents a company, you will need a paid subscription. If you don't have an Akismet key yet, go to the Akismet website and choose an anti-spam solution that suits you. After you have received the key, you can enter it in the comment center in the configuration.

Character encoding

Which character encoding standards are supported by FlatPress?

FlatPress currently supports two character encoding standards. ISO-8859-15 (Latin-9) and UTF-8. UTF-8 is recommended. To change the character encoding, log in to the administration area and open the “Configuration” menu.

Although FlatPress with in Greek supports the character encoding ISO-8859-7, the title of the entry must correspond to UTF-8 or ISO-8859-15. See issue #281

doc/techfaq.txt · Last modified: 2024/02/18 14:34 by fraenkiman

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