Personal index php topic powered by smf. First steps in search engine optimization Simple Machines Forum: removing copyright and external links. Solving problems when installing mods that do not support the Russian language

Everyone knows that I simply cannot live without Joomla, but, in my opinion, there is no good forum for components. That's why I work with forum engines. One of the new ones that I just recently started using is Let's start a new SMF category with hopefully useful stuff. We start small, and as beginners it’s very useful.

First steps in search engine optimization Simple Machines Forum: removing copyright and external links

Let me make a reservation right away that I only work with smf 2 and this article will relate specifically to this version of the free forum engine.

And so, regular readers know how much I don’t like putting “10” external links to the official websites of engines, including forum ones. That is why, first of all, we remove the copyright and as many as 4, attention 4 external links of the form " SMF 2.0.2 | Simple Machines | SMF © 2011 | XHTML"! To do this, connect to the site via FTP forum/Themes/ name of your theme/ and edit the file index.template.php. Naturally, at the very bottom there is a code (about line 330) that displays external links that we don’t like so much. Therefore we delete: "

", theme_copyright(), "

" And " ", $txt["xhtml"], "
". It’s all so simple and easy. In the coming publications, expect new materials on promoting and optimizing forums on SMF/

Let's start right away with the main script code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# which-forum.pl script
# (c) 2010 Alexandr A Alexeev, http://site/

use strict;

# commented lines - for rigor
# if the task is to collect engine statistics, leave it as is
# if you make a list of forums - uncomment

my $data ;
$data .= $_while (<> ) ;

# check how much was Powered by phpBB without a link in the footer
print "phpbb \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?phpbb\.com\/?"[^>]*>phpBB/i or
# $data =~ /viewforum\.php\?[^""]*f=\d+/i or
$data =~ /phpBB\-SEO/i or
$data =~ /) ;
print "ipb \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?invision(?:board|power)\.com\/?[^"]*"[^>]*> [^<]*IP\.Board/i or
$data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?invisionboard\.com\/?"[^>]*>Invision Power Board/i or
$data =~ /

/i or
$data =~ /index\.php\?[^""]*showforum=\d+/i) ;
print "vbulletin \n"
if ($data =~ /Powered by:?[^<]+vBulletin[^<]+(?:Version)?/i or
$data =~ /) ;
print "smf \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?simplemachines\.org\/?"[^>]*>Powered by SMF/i or
$data =~ /index\.php\?[^""]*board=\d+\.0/i) ;
print "punbb \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:(?:www\.)?punbb\.org|punbb\.informer\.com)\/?"[^>]*> PunBB/i) ; #or
# $data =~ /viewforum\.php\?[^""]*id=\d+/i);
print "fluxbb \n"
# if($data =~ /viewtopic\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ( $data =~ /]+href="http:\/\/(?:www\.)fluxbb\.org\/?"[^>]*>FluxBB/i) ;
print "exbb \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?exbb\.org\/?"[^>]*>ExBB/i) ; # or
# $data =~ /forums\.php\?[^""]*forum=\d+/i);
print "yabb \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?yabbforum\.com\/?"[^>]*>YaBB/i or
$data =~ /YaBB\.pl\?[^""]*num=\d+/i ) ;
print "dleforum \n"
if ($data =~ /$Powered By DLE Forum$<\/title>/i or
$data =~ /]+href="[^"]+(?:http:\/\/(?:www\.)?dle\-files\.ru|act=copyright)[^"]*">DLE Forum<\/a>/i) ;
print "ikonboard \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?ikonboard\.com\/?[^"]*"[^>]*>Ikonboard/i or
$data =~ /\n"
if ($data =~ /\n"
# if($data =~ /forums\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
# $data =~ /topic\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /]+href="http:\/\/(?:www\.)?flashbb\.net\/?"[^>]*>FlashBB/i) ;
print "stokesit \n"
# if($data =~ /forum\.php\?f=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /]+href="http:\/\/(?:www\.)?stokesit\.com\.au\/?"[^>]*>[^\/]*Stokes IT/i) ;
print "podium \n"
# if($data =~ /topic\.php\?t=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /]+href=[""]?http:\/\/(?:www\.)?sopebox\.com\/?[""]?[^>]*>Podium/i) ;
print "usebb \n"
# if($data =~ /forum\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /]+href="http:\/\/(?:www\.)?usebb\.net\/?"[^>]*>UseBB/i) ;
print "wrforum \n"
# if($data =~ /index\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /]+href="http:\/\/(?:www\.)?wr\-script\.ru\/?"[^>]*>WR\-Forum/i) ;
print "yetanotherforumnet \n"
if ($data =~ /Yet Another Forum\.net/i or
$data =~ /default\.aspx\?g=posts&t=\d+/i) ;

You will find this and other scripts mentioned in the post in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the HTML page code to see if it contains signatures of the forum engine. We used a similar technique when Definition of WordPress and Joomla, but there are a couple of differences. Firstly, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows you to download the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several analyzers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script the presence of a signature is 100% a sign of the engine. Last time, the presence of a signature only added weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the greatest weight “won”. I decided that in this case, such an approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

To test the script, I did some research. I compiled a list of several thousand forums and ran each of them through my script, thereby determining the percentage of program responses and the popularity of various engines.

To get a list of forums I used with your Google parser. Queries like this were sent to the search engine

site:forum.*.ru
site:talk.*.ru
site:board.*.ru
site:smf.*.ru
site:phpbb.*.ru
....

and so on. You will find the complete query generator code in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl. In addition to zone.ru, .su .ua .kz and .by were also used. Last time, it was difficult to conduct such a study, since WordPress and Joomla sites do not have such signatures in the URL. Catalogs like cmsmagazine.ru/catalogue/ do not provide a sufficient sample size. What is 600 Drupal sites?

I must admit, the results of the experiment disappointed me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, the engine was successfully identified on only 7,083, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I didn't take into account some engine? Was it really true that half of the forums had Bitrix installed? Or should I have spent more time searching for signatures? In general, additional research is required here.

Among the 56% of successfully identified engines, the most popular, as expected, were IPB (31%), phpBB (26.6%) and vBulletin (26.5%)

They are followed with a large lag by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB ended up only in 6th place (1.64%). I wouldn’t recommend putting much faith in these numbers (they say that every third forum on the RuNet runs on IPB), but certain conclusions can, of course, be drawn.

For example, if you intend to make a site on a forum engine and plan to modify the forum, say, pay users $0.01 for each message with automatic withdrawal of funds once a week, then you should choose one of the three most popular engines. The more popular the forum, the greater the chances of finding a programmer who is well versed in it.

If no significant changes are expected in the engine, then it may make sense to choose a less popular engine, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of spam automatically sent on it.

Scripts for searching/identifying forums can also find many practical applications. The first thing that came to my mind was this sort by TCI identified forums and place posts on the first hundred with links to one of your sites. However, hundreds of forum dofollow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates have passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are not interested in transitions.

It is clear that the mentioned use of scripts is far from the only one. I think you can easily figure out how else you can use them.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. So, we continue the topic of setting up the forum engine called SMF, which we started in the post about it. There we have not yet made the forum Russian, in terms of translation from the English interface. At the moment it does not look very presentable, but after Russification (if it has not already been done) and the creation of the appropriate sections, its appearance will improve significantly.

Today we will look at the design themes and make it Russian, and also install the JFusion component, which can work with both engines (Jumla and SMF), which will allow us to have a common user base for two and only one form for their registration and login.

Themes and installation of the Russian language pack

The Simple Machines Forum engine supports the ability to change themes, and they can be changed both for the entire forum and for its individual sections in particular. Personally, I used the default theme, but made quite a lot of changes to it manually. In particular, I changed the background, the colors of some elements, added a clock on a flash drive, a radio and much more, which I will talk about in subsequent posts in this section.

Why didn't I use any of the additional themes when creating the forum? Well, it's probably all about my laziness. No, I was not lazy to search and download new themes, fortunately there are many places where this can be done. My laziness lies elsewhere.

The fact is that the whole variety of mods for this engine, designed to expand its capabilities, is focused specifically on the default theme. Let me explain. If you have a default theme, then adding a mod to SMF takes place in a matter of seconds and, as a rule, does not require manual editing of the code.

If you install a mod with a design theme different from the default one, you will need, as they say, to process all the raw parts with a file. In other words, you will have to use FileZilla (download and configure it; you can access the site via FTP and open for editing the files of your forum engine, which this mod makes changes to.

Then look for the right place in the code and perform the necessary actions: either replacing the code, or deleting, or adding a section of code before or after the required fragment. If you consider that there may be about a dozen files to which changes will need to be made, then you can imagine how troublesome it will be to do this. In this case, you need to be very careful and not make mistakes, because otherwise the forum may not open at all.

If all the above problems of using a non-default theme do not scare you, then you can download them from here. The themes there are sorted into sections (minimalism, close to classical, modern, etc.) and for each of them you can see a screenshot of it in full screen. I’ll tell you how to install these same themes a little later.

If you did not Russify the forum at the stage of uploading the engine files to the hosting, as was described in the first part of this opus (see the link at the very beginning of the article), then you can do it now. The Russian language pack with the required one, previously downloaded from this page, needs to be unpacked, and then copied the Themes folder to the root folder, where there is already a directory with the same name.

After copying is complete, you need to log into the forum using the administrator username and password. Select “Admin” in the top menu, and then click “Server Settings” in the left column.

In the window that opens, find the “Default Forum Language” item and select the Russian language from the drop-down list, and then click on the “Save” button at the bottom of the page.

That's it, now your conference is completely in Russian.

Solving problems when installing mods that do not support the Russian language

Please note that in the future, when adding mods to SMF that do not have a Russian translation, you may sometimes have a problem with displaying the mod settings in the admin panel. Actually, these same settings will simply not be visible in the admin panel, because... there will be no Russification files for them. Therefore, you will have two options to solve this problem.

The first way is to switch to English for the entire forum. You can see how this can be done a few paragraphs above. Accordingly, after you perform the necessary actions with these settings, you will need to return to Russian again.

The second method is more complicated, but it will allow us to see the settings of installed mods in the admin panel always, and not only when the English language is activated. I dwell on this point in such detail because the question that someone installed a mod and cannot find its settings in the admin panel of their conference is a very common one.

So, the second method is to add translation strings to the Russification files for the newly added mods. I’ll tell you later how to determine which Russification files need to be changed and where to get them. In the meantime, temporarily, you can use the first method.

Installing JFusion for website and forum integration

First you will need to download JFusion and its Russification. Having entered the Joomla admin panel, we perform standard actions: select from the top menu of the admin panel the items “Extensions” - “Install/Uninstall” - “Download package file” - the “Browse” button - find the file with the component jfusion_package.zip on your computer - click on the button “ Upload file&Install>".

After this, a window appears informing you that the component was installed successfully. If problems arise, you can familiarize yourself with solutions to some of them at the link given just above.

Now it’s time for Russification, which is added in exactly the same way as the component itself. Those. repeat the sequence of actions: “Extensions” - “Install/Uninstall” - “Download package file” - “Browse” button - find the JFusion Russification file on your computer - click on the “Download file & Install” button. Now we can go to the settings along the path “Components” - “JFusion” and make sure that Russification has been successfully added and is working.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site