BellaBuzz

Tutorial hardness: Medium
Download: JemJaBella
BellaBuzz is an “Ask n Answer” script (also known as ‘faq’ script/basic knowledgebase). It was designed to replace the popular but insecure “Waks Ask and Answer”. It is simple to install and easy to customise, running on flat files instead of a complex MySQL database.

Installing BellaBuzz

  • After you have downloaded BellaBuzz, unzip it and open the prefs.php file. Customize the options underlined in this image.
  • When you’re all done, upload the whole lot to your website using your normal FTP client. You now need to use the chmod command to change the permission of the “.txt” files to 666.

    • Customizing BellaBuzz

    In this part we’re going to make your BellaBuzz match the rest of your site; It’s pretty easy.

  • First open up questions.php. Find the part that has:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <html>
    <head>
    <title>BellaBuzz</title>
    <style type="text/css">
    * { font: 11px/15px Verdana, Sans-Serif; }
    .question { font-weight: bold; font-size: 12px; }
    .answer { font-style: italic; }
    .dates { display: block; text-align: right; font-size: 10px; }
    </style>
    </head>
    <body>
  • Now I want you to replace all that with <?php require('//home/YOURABSOLUTEPATH//public_html/wp-blog-header.php'); ?><?php get_header(); ?>
  • To find your absolute path, create a page in the main directory of your website called ‘path.php’ Copy the code below into that page and save it. <?php echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']; ?>
  • To get your absolute path, go to http://yoursite.com/path.php and copy all of what you see. Make sure you delete the file afterwards. Paste your absolute path into the code above.
  • Scroll all the way to the bottom and include your footer code: <?php get_footer(); ?>
  • Now in your theme style sheet, add something like this:
    .question {
    font-weight: bold;
    color: #000;
    }

    .answer {
    font-weight: bold;
    color: #fff;
    }

    .date {
    font-weight: bold;
    color: #000;
    }     Customize it to a way that you see fit.
  • Go into your questions.php and find where codes that show your questions are displayed. Add the classes to it and you should have something like: <p>
    <span class="question"><?php echo $question; ?></span><br>
    <span class="answer"><?php echo nl2br($answer); ?></span><br>
    <span class="dates">Asked: <?php echo date($timestamp, strtotime($dateask)); ?> | Answered: <?php echo date($timestamp, strtotime($dateanswer)); ?></span>
    </p>

    • Viewing/Using

  • To ask a question go to http://yoursite.com/ask/questions.php. Change yoursite.com to your site url and ask to the name of your bellabuzz folder.
  • To answer a question, go to http://yoursite.com/ask/admin.php Change yoursite.com to your site url and ask to the name of your bellabuzz folder.

    • And that’s all there is to it. If you anymore question on installing, customizing or using bellabuzz, feel free to ask me.

Post to Twitter