Siteframe

Siteframe Q&A

What can I do with Siteframe?
Create a corporate intranet application where your employees can share documents, diagrams, and files. Make a weblog where you and your friends can contribute stories, pictures, and links. Build a community-service site that's easily updatable by your office staff. Make your forms and papers available as PDF documents on the web so that you don't need to mail them. In short, you can build any type of website with Siteframe; it especially excels at sites with lots of different kinds of content.

What kinds of content does Siteframe support?
Siteframe supports articles (mostly text web pages), images (JPEG or PNG format), files (any kind of uploaded file), links (Internet page URLs), and Polls (multiple-choice voting boxes).

What do I need to run Siteframe?
Siteframe has been developed on a Unix or Linux system running the Apache webserver, the PHP language, and the MySQL relational database system. Some users have reported success running Siteframe on Windows 2000 computers. For more information, see "Required Software."

How much does it cost?
Siteframe is free! It's covered by a Creative Commons license that requires attribution and "share alike" (i.e., you have to impose the same conditions on anyone you give it to).

Can I use Siteframe for my custom application?
Siteframe is built around an flexible object-document framework that you can easily extend to support specialized document classes. For example, the bug reports on this site are actually a custom extension to the default Siteframe article type. If you need assistance, consulting and development is available.

Requirements

• Apache 1.3.19. It is presumed that Siteframe will function with other versions; however, this is the only version of Apache that has been tested. Users have reported using Siteframe on a Windows 2000/NT server with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS); however, this has not been verified by me.
• PHP version 4.0.6 4.1. Siteframe will not function with prior versions because it relies upon certain functions that were introduced in 4.0.6 4.1. It will not work with PHP3, and there is currently no intention to attempt a port. PHP must be compiled with the --with-jpeg option if you want to use Image documents. There may be undocumented dependencies on other PHP modules.

Note: Siteframe requires that the PHP configuration option register_globals be set to On. While this is currently considered bad practice in the PHP programming community, and it represents a small security rish, I have not yet had the leisure to convert all the code to remove the dependency (prior versions of PHP had register_globals On by default; in fact, there was no way to turn it off when I first started writing Siteframe. Note: I am attempting to make Siteframe more secure; however, the functions that allow this are only available in PHP 4.1 and later.

• GD2.0 - PHP4 must be installed to utilize the GD2.0 image processing library. This is required in order to support the image resampling process. Note: Siteframe can optionally use GD1.8; however, there will be limited functionality in image processing, since GD1.8 cannot perform bicubic image scaling (it only has a brute-force "image resize" function that introduces artifacts into the image).
• MySQL 3.23.32. Siteframe has not been tested with prior versions of MySQL. It is expected to function with newer releases unless there is a significant change in the supported SQL syntax.
• PHP scripts that generate charts (all of them are called chart_something) use the open-source PHPlot library. Under FreeBSD, this can be installed via the ports library at /user/ports/graphics/phplot; other operating systems may require a download and manual installation.

Siteframe also provides a number of shell scripts that have been written for the FreeBSD version of /bin/sh. They should function with little modification on other UNIX/Linux computers. However, they will probably require modification to work under Windows NT and similar.