LiteDoodle Installation and Readme


V. Harishankar

1. About LiteDoodle

LiteDoodle is a Free Software program that is used to create simple, lightweight comic/image blogs with RSS feeds and a commenting system. I created this as a way to host my cartoon strips because there really is no simple, easy to use PHP blog software that is specific for comic strips.

LiteDoodle is meant to be very easy to use, with little configuration options and to be updated easily (as easily as uploading a single image into a folder!)

Driven entirely by a simple configuration file, LiteDoodle does not require MySQL databases and doesn't use complex admin panels that have a learning curve of their own.

2. Installation

To install LiteDoodle on your site, simply follow these steps.

3. Features

Although meant to be a simple application, LiteDoodle has a few useful features.

  1. Autogenerated archives page.
  2. Commenting system with configurable spam protection system (using a Turing Test-style Q & A).
  3. Turn on/off comments for entire blog.
  4. Optional textual descriptions for images/comics.
  5. RSS feed.

More importantly, these are the features you won't find.

  1. Categorization/tagging of images.
  2. Admin panel backend.
  3. Blog search facility.
  4. User registration and other user-management functions.

4. FAQ

4.1. General FAQ

4.1.1. What can I use LiteDoodle for?

If you have a lot of images/pictures you wish to publish in a simple blog format with a commenting system, use LiteDoodle. If you are looking for a complicated Image Gallery software with advanced categorization, tagging/search features, user management functions and an admin panel setup, this is not for you.

4.1.2. Is LiteDoodle free of cost?

Yes. It is also Free as in Speech. Look at the GPL section below.

4.1.3. Is it possible to add more features? Can you do it for me?

No. It's really a simple PHP script (and a little ugly too) so you should be able to easily modify it to suit your needs. This is not meant to be a really complex image gallery script. There are plenty of good image gallery scripts out there, so you should use one of those if you need those layers of complexity.

4.1.4. Why no MySQL?

It's my belief that using a MySQL database adds too much complexity to simple applications and small websites. Yes, sure, when you're developing a highly interactive Content Management System with multiple user levels, complex admin panels and such, you cannot do without a database system of some kind. But for a simple blog application such as this, it's not really necessary at all.

4.1.5. Will there be updates?

At present none are planned. However if there are some major security issues, I will address them.

4.2. Usage and features FAQ

4.2.1. How do I update/add/delete entries from my comic blog?

Just upload a new image into your "comics" folder. Make sure the file's modification date/time is the current date/time. Otherwise it might get sorted as an older entry. To delete entries, simply delete an existing image (and optionally its corresponding comments file/description file.

4.2.2. How can I add descriptive text below the comic strips? I don't want to just display an image.

Create a new file with the name of the image file (example if the image is my-first-toon.png, create a my-first-toon.png.desc ) in the comics folder and put your description there. It will automatically add the text below the image. You can use HTML if you like.

4.2.3. How is the title generated for an image/entry?

If you want to title your image "A Sample Toon" name your image as follows a-sample-toon.jpg (or gif or png). The dashes will get converted to spaces and the individual words are capitalized automatically.

4.2.4. How can I turn off user commenting for the whole blog?

Edit the config.php and look for the line

define (COMMENTS_ENABLED, TRUE)
and change it to
define (COMMENTS_ENABLED, FALSE)

4.2.5. How can I turn off user commenting for a single entry?

This is currently not possible.

4.2.6. How can I edit/delete a user comment?

Comments for images, for instance a.png or a.jpg are stored in files named a.png.txt or a.jpg.txt created inside the comments folder. Edit this file to edit/delete individual comments for a particular entry. Delete the entire file if you want to delete all the comments.

4.2.7. How can I add custom pages with the same look as my blog?

Very simple. Just copy the about.php file template and create another one with your own name (example, artwork.php ). Then just modify its contents to suit your needs. You can edit everything between the PHP lines

include ('header.php');
and
include ('footer.php');
Modify only the HTML portion that is outside the <?php and ?> tag.

To change the title of your custom page, just look for this line:

$page_title = "About - " . SITE_TITLE;
and change it to whatever you wish (the SITE_TITLE text is a constant which prints out your blog title).

4.2.8. How can I change the look and feel of my blog?

Very simple. Edit the style.css file in your favourite programming editor and modify the attributes. A CSS tutorial is beyond the scope of this documentation, however ;-)

If you're a really advanced user and need more customization, you can directly edit the index.php and archives.php file (and also any of the custom PHP files you've created) but this is not recommended.

4.3. More Questions?

If you've got any more questions on usage, just e-mail them to me at v dot harishankar at gmail. The answer will be added to the next version of this FAQ.

5. GPL License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses


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