Dynamic PHP Modsite with the LDU CMS tutorial

[page=Introduction]
Your mod's great new site was going great, you followed the Setting up your mod's site Tutorial, added all your content, and started to get hits. The mod got popular. Things went down hill from there though. Your coder wanted to post news updates every 3 days, and then your mappers had fifty images they wanted added to the gallery. You were the only one with ftp access to the site though, so the team couldn't do the updates themselves, they all had to go through you. Updates on the site slowed, leaving the public with no real idea what was going on behind the scenes.

There really is a way to keep your site updated without ftp access. You can’t do it with static html though. Today's websites can be dynamic however, updatable by any member of your team that you assign access to. There’s a lot of different ways to do this, but the one I’m showing here has power you’ll need and I know its worked great for some other mod teams. The “content management system” is called “Land Down Under,” and you will need a web hosting with a feature called "PHP." This lets the server make decisions based on data in a database, in our case we'll use "Mysql." Your hosting will need that too. Basically these are the same technologies most forums use, so if your running a forum, you’ll be fine.

[page=Land Down Under]
Land Down Under, or LDU, is a very capable web site engine. Its similar to Php-Nuke Which you may have heard of or seen in action, but it is much easier for you to run and is far more flexible if you want your site to look unique.

The offical site is at Neocrome.net so go ahead and grab LDU V702 From This Link.

IF you want to make sure you can run LDU first, here are the requirements as stated in the documentation:

A webserver !
Apache is the most well known and recommended, but any other serious HTTP server should work.

PHP 4.3.0 or newer
LDU should work with most of the older 4.x PHP versions, but if your host still has such an older version, it might be time to move. Note, LDU most likely won’t work right with PHP 5.

A MySQL database
You’ll need to know the username and password for this, contact your host if need be.

A tool to manage the SQL database
... the most common is phpMyAdmin.
There's no auto-installer in LDU on purpose, this to force you to have a basic knowledge of such a tool.
If you're planning to run a PHP/MySQL website without a database manager, expect troubles. Cpanel, and most other hosting control panels have this.

A basic knowledge of HTML
Required, if you're lacking this, please consider the reading of HTML tutorials before running a website.

A basic knowledge of PHP
If you're able to open a file with a text editor, and then able to put few values at the right place without messing the rest of the file, it's fine, you can consider yourself as enough-PHP-experienced-for-LDU.

If you meet all those requirements, go ahead and unrar the download, and then get ready to make some edits. You can make all these edits in a simple text editor such as notepad.

Important Steps
1) Open up datas/config.php and edit your email, your website title and the url to your site (for example "http://hatmod.com".

2) Also in config.php you will need to get your database information, if you don't know it, ask your host.

3) This is the hardest part now, you will need to use phpmyadmin to create the tables in "docs/ldu-createnew-702.sql". Cpanel includes phpmyadmin under its "mysql" option, and I assume that similar hosting panels have a similar option. In phpmyadmin, select your database from the dropdown box on the left, then click the sql tab. There you will paste the contents of “ldu-createnew-702.sql” into the box and click the submit button.

4) Congratulations if your to step 4, you got past the hardest part and your now ready to upload all the folders except for docs to your webserver.

The following folders also need their permissions chmodded to '777':

/datas/avatars/
/datas/thumbs/
/datas/tmp/
/datas/users/

You can usually do this from an option when you right click a folder in your ftp program, but if you can't find out how, go ahead and consult its manual/help system.

5) Now you get to do the fun stuff. Go to your site and it should have a sample news post if everything went A-Ok. Click the register link and signup an account for yourself, the first account automatically receives admin access. The site operates similarly to a forum (and it includes one too.)

6) Skinning LDU is very easy. As of the 700 series the skin is all XHTML, so just by editing the css and images in the skins/corporate folder you can make a lot of changes. I don't even pretend to be a good web designer, and this tutorial was marked 'intermediate' for a reason, so I'll let your artistic side take over for a while.

Other Notes
The admin panel has a lot of options, so don't hit anything you don't understand but go ahead and explore as well, there’s no button to explode your site.

If you plan on giving your team access to things such as the pfs.php File system all you have to do is find their user account from the user list and click edit, where you can select a userlevel. These userlevels can be edited from the admin panel. Its alright to give your members access to the admin because they can only edit users that are lower than them so there’s no danger of a takeover.

You can also set your team members through that same 'User Levels' section to have access to certain portions of the site, but not others. That way only you and your trusted members can post news or screenshots, but the others can still moderate your forums.

On the Land Down Under site, there’s a listing of “plugins” which you can use to extend the sites functionality. All the good ones have good instructions on installation, so don’t sweat that.
If you have any questions about LDU, feel free to pm me or comment here because I work with it on a daily basis from both a management and coding perspective.