This discussion/tutor will be in two parts. Part 1 will be  a discussion of RSS and how to put subscriptions links on your site. Part 2 will be how to market your site with RSS by placing comments below this tutor. Even without Part 2, Part 1 could be a benefit to your members and your site if you understand how RSS can be used.

Before I get started, a big thank you to Radioact/vldCrowd for his help on coding the links for RSS subscriptions.

HEADER.TPL

If you look at the header.tpl you will notice coding between the head tags that looks like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="{settings.app_title} | {app_page}" href="{virtual_path}{member_blog_rss_link}" />

By providing the above code in the header.tpl, it makes it easier for browsers and RSS aggregators (readers) to automatically discover your rss feed for indexing and subscription services (will give an example of using a RSS reader later).

Vlad also uses conditional statements in the head tag like this:

<!-- IF active_module == "news" AND settings.enable_news_feed -->

What this means is if you have news settings turned on in the CP (most do) and are on the news page (it is the active module) you will see the subscription icon in the browser.

Should we add it to the homepage.tpl

I'm far from an expert in coding (vlad & radioact are), but from a user's perspective, my only concern with the conditional statements in the header.tpl is that most visitors initially land on your home page. If a user lands on your home page and is looking for a subscription service via browser icon, they may not be aware of it since all conditional statements in the header are coded to be displayed when that template is the active module as is the case for the news feed.

Before I talk more about the homepage.tpl, understand that most of the RSS feeds are based on member's input and not on your overall website. For example,  when Member A writes a blog OR if Member B signs Member C's guestbook a RSS feed is created. This type of RSS  makes the RSS feed member orientated. You could make an exception to this with your site's news feed which we will talk about next for your homepage.tpl.

Unlike blogs and guestbooks, News feed is created by the Admin. This makes this feed more of a site feed rather than a member orientated feed. Consequently, I would use your news feed as a way to display a RSS icon on your homepage.tpl by making the following changes in your header.tpl.

FIND IN YOUR HEAD TAGS

<!-- IF active_module == "news" AND settings.enable_news_feed -->

CHANGE TO:

<!-- IF active_module == "news" OR active_module == "homepage" AND settings.enable_news_feed -->

NOTE:  if you are going to make this change to your header, recommend you add  a link in your footer for the news feed which I will show you how to do later.

Now if a visitor lands on my home page looking for an RSS feed in his browser, he will see the RSS icon for the News feed.

If a visitors clicks the icon on the home page, they will see the RSS News feed and can subscribe.

SUBSCRIPTION LINKS

Subscription links is just another way of providing visitors and members a way to subscribe to a news feed. What I want to discuss is how to create these links.

Before I get started one caveat. Not all browsers can handle the coding for RSS templates in vldPersonals. In most cases we are talking about older browsers.

If I click an RSS link using an older browser (for example, i.e. 6) it will ask you if you want to download the file instead of displaying the RSS feed. Probably this isn't a big concern since most are using the latest browsers, but I wanted to make you aware of it.

FOOTER SUBSCRIPTION LINK FOR SITE NEWS

Where you want to put the link in the footer is up to you. Here is the coding for the link:

<a href="{virtual_path}news/rss/" title="{app_page}">Site News Subscription</a>

If you want to use the RSS icon with your link you would have to download and upload the icon to your templates media folder. Since the icon is an image, there may be some formatting involved to display the icon the way you want in your footer. I went without the icon, but if I did use it, the link would look something like this:

<a href="{virtual_path}news/rss/">Site News Subscription</a> <img src="{virtual_tpl_path}{session.template}/media/rss2.gif" border="0" align="absmiddle" />

Note: you can find tons of RSS icons by googling.

SUBSCRIPTION LINK FOR MEMBER'S BLOG

There are two templates I would consider for placing a subscription link for member's blogs: MEMBER_BLOG.TPL & MEMBER_BLOG_ENTRY.TPL

Where you place them is up to you but the coding may be slightly different depending on where you place the link in the template.

MEMBER_BLOG.TPL

Here is where I placed it on my site:

FIND: <li>{lang:"member","post_date"} {entry_post_date}</li>

AFTER ADD: <li><a href="{top.virtual_path}{top.member_blog_rss_link}" title="{app_page}">Subscribe to {top.member_username} Blog</a></li>

NOTE: Since I placed the link inside an array, I had to use "top" in the path statements. If you place the code outside an array on member_blog.tpl you probably don't have to use "top" in your link. Instead it would look like:

AFTER ADD: <li><a href="{virtual_path}{member_blog_rss_link}" title="{app_page}">Subscribe to {member_username} Blog</a></li>

If you are not sure, try one if it works you got it. If not, try the other.

MEMBER_BLOG_ENTRY.TPL

On my site, I placed it at:

FIND: <li>{lang:"member","post_date"} {entry_post_date}</li>

AFTER ADD: <li><a href="{virtual_path}{member_blog_rss_link}" title="{app_page}">Subscribe to {member_username} Blog</a></li>

NOTE: same note as above about using "top" or not in your link.

If member A is in love with simplebutterfly, they may subscribe to her blog on google reader, facebook, myspace, youtube reader and a thousand other places. Or if another site is just looking for some content for their site, they may subscribe as well. It doesn't matter, it is a link to your site, that is all you care about.

SUBSCRIPTION LINK FOR MEMBER'S GUESTOOK

There is only one template I used for subscription link for member's Guestook: MEMBER_GUESTBOOK.TPL

FIND: <li>{lang:"member","post_date"} {entry_post_date}</li>

AFTER ADD: <li><a href="{top.virtual_path}{top.member_guestbook_rss_link}" title="{app_page}">Subscribe to {top.member_username} Guestbook</a></li>

NOTE: Since I placed the link inside an array, I had to use "top" in the path statements. If you place the code outside an array on member_guestbook.tpl you probably don't have to use "top" in your link.

MEMBER_SECTIONS_CARD.TPL

I would of never figured this one out without Radioacts/vldCrowd blog post and his help.

The concern with putting a blog link in the member_sections_card.tpl is having a link in a member's profile when they did not create a blog.  Consequently, we only want to create a link in their profile if the member created a blog. Here is the coding:

<!-- IF settings.enable_blogs AND member_total_blogs > "0" -->
<dt>Member's Blog</dt>
<dd><a href="{top.virtual_path}member/{member_id}/blog/rss/">Subscribe to {member_username} blog</a></dd>
<!-- ENDIF -->

Where you place the above code in member_sections_card.tpl is up to you, but I usually just keep adding new code at the end of the links

SUBSCRIPTION LINK FOR EVENTS

I don't use Events on my site so I did not do the coding. However, with the above examples, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Without looking more into it,  Events seems more like an overall site RSS link than a member's RSS link. If that is true, you may want to lean towards a link similar to the News RSS subscription link. I'm sure those who use Events on their site can figure out which is the best type of link to use based on the above examples.

NOW WHAT

Before we talk about marketing with RSS, I wanted to give you some idea of how RSS readers work. The list of readers is overwhelming so don't be shy -- start googling and you will find tons of ways to use RSS links.

There are basically three types of readers, (1)desktop readers, (2)personal site & browser readers and (3) website readers.

With desktop readers you do not have to be online to read the content of the RSS feed. You can read it from your desktop.

Personal Site & Browser readers are usually part of a site -- for example if you have a Yahoo My Page you can subscribe to RSS feeds, if you have a google account you can subscribe to RSS feeds, if you use firefox as your browser you can bookmark and subscribe to a RSS feed, etc.

Website readers are usually used to place RSS feeds on your own website. Seeme uses a Website reader on his site as I do on one of my sites. In some cases all it takes is a link, other times it requires you to install some code be it php or javascript.

I'll  demo a few readers but hopefully others will provide feedback  if they discover a RSS reader and the best way to use it.

Desktop  Readers

The little demo above is only meant to give you a flavor of RSS readers. It would take hours to cover all the variety of readers and how to use them. You may be asking,  are users savvy enough to use them. I was surprised how savvy they were. Since this is my first round with vldPersonals and RSS it is too early to tell, but with my other sites, I can report how pleasantly surprised I would be when I would discover my RSS content from my wordpress or 4images site on another website.

Lets look at some other options you can explore

Personal Sites and Browser Readers

Google Reader: http://www.google.com/reader

Yahoo Reader: http://my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/index.html

If you use firefox as a browser (this is probably true of other browsers, but I'm more familiar with firefox), there are several ways to subscribe to a feed as you can see in the image below.

Website Readers

This is probably the most popular and  useful RSS reader. If another webmaster finds your site content interesting he may place a RSS link of your site's content on his site.

I'm a little cautious about placing my own RSS link on my site in fear of being penalized by google, but below is an image of a RSS Reader on my site reading the feed from another site. The same theory if a webmaster decided to put your RSS feed on his site.

My thoughts are that vldPersonals made a good start with RSS, but in future updates, I hope there are  RSS feeds to global blogs, global videos, and global pictures, etc, to increase interest from other webmasters, which in turn will give you more  inbound links and traffic.

RSS Marketing

I'm been debating how to discuss part 2 and marketing with RSS. Depending on the marketing technique each topic could be an article in itself. After some thought, I think it would be best to add comments below this post related to RSS marketing. Now that you have an idea how RSS works on vldPersonals, the challenge is how to use it to help promote your site. For example, how to use RSS with twitter to market your site, how to use facebook, myspace, etc.

I have noticed many places in vld software for improvements which I read about everywhere in the forum. This is a neat little thing I thought of fixing after it annoyed me. If you click on the 'friends' or 'favorites' link and you don't have any friends or faves, you get an ugly error message: "You don't have any friends...."

Well guess what? The same kind of thing happens with members!

How fix??

Header.tpl:

Under logged in area:
<!-- IF settings.enable_favorites -->
(display the favorites link)
ENDIF,

CHANGE THIS TO:

<!-- IF settings.enable_favorites AND {member_total_favorites} =="0" -->
&nbsp;
<!-- ELSE -->
<li>{anchor:url1="account/favorites/",url2="index.php?m=account_favorites",name="core|usermenu_favorites"}</li>

This code basically says, if you have NO favorites, DON'T display the favorites link!

Same with friends,

CHANGE THIS: <!-- IF settings.enable_friends ------

TO THIS:  <!-- IF settings.enable_friends AND {member_total_friends} =="0" -->
&nbsp;
<!-- ELSE -->
<!-- IF session.new_friends > "0" -->
    <li><a href=".....................

Get the picture???  - MUCH more professional.

Ad blindness occurs because regular visitors see the same ads over and over and in time your ads melt into the background instead of standing out. When your ads become routine occurrences that visitors see over and over, their brain filters out routine ads and they are ignored. Not good if you rely on ads to make money from your site.

Ad blindness was first discovered by adsense users but more and more affiliate advertisers are promoting cures for ad blindness. vldPersonals commercial version provides banner/ad management in the control panel (CP), but it is limited and not very efficient. This article is to show you how to utilize vldPersonals to best manage your banners/ads and avoid ad blindness.

The answer to ad blindness is to vary your banners/ads so the visitor does not see the same ads over and over. Thanks to Ramil/Radioact, the vldCrowd owner, a minor change will help avoid some inefficiencies of vldPersonals banner management. I will discuss how to make Ramil's changes later.

First, lets look at an image of the default ad/banner management v.s. Ramil changes that will help manage your banners/ads.

In your CP, you  find the individual banners at: content/manage banners/click one of the banner groups. Note: if you did not add a banner under one of the banner groups, you will not see the individual  banner table.

If you click one of your banners, you have the option to make a banner active or inactive, however, this is very inefficient for managing ad blindness. Hence Ramil's change (see above image) was to make managing individual banners/ads more efficient by providing an easier and faster way to make your banners/ads active or inactive.

To make Ramil's  changes to manage individual banners, download the following zip folder, unzip folder and upload to your server replacing default files. Be sure to backup before replacing files.

http://www.filipina-lady.net/test253/banners_switch.zip

[size=18]How to use vldPersonals with the Above Changes to Manage Ad Blindness and Change Content[/size].

Now that we understand what ad blindness is and have Ramil's change in place, lets see how best to utilize vldPersonals ad/banner management to avoid ad blindness and change our content.

UPDATE: If you read previous articles on how to manage ads in vldPersonals, you need to be aware of a change from 2.5.2 of vldPersonals to 2.5.3.

When coding for individual ads within a banner group, the code will look like this for 2.5.3:

{banners:group="homepage",banner="side01"}

Basically the difference is, in 2.5.2 you use label= while in 2.5.3 you use banner= to display individual banners within an ad banner group.

My plan is as follows:

Since I'm concerned about ad blindness with adsense, the rest of the article will address how to manage adsense and my content with this approach. However, it will work with any type of ads, including affiliate ads. You can also include different formatting codes with your ad to change your template's format. If you are thinking initially this will take effort to setup, you are right. But once it is setup, it will be a matter of turning ads on (active) and off (inactive) to help avoid ad blindness or change conent. If you had to apply this tutor to only one area of your site, I would recommend your home page.

Here is an outline of my approach:

1. Create individual banner groups for each template - in our tutor we will be working on homepage and header templates.

2. Within each banner group, I will have different banners for that template including some format coding.

3. I will be changing content on my home page by using this method.

4. I will turn certain banners on and off by using the active/inactive switch created with Ramil's changes.

5. By varying my banners and content I hope to avoid ad blindness and attract the search engine spider more often.

The coding that I will be using in each banner in my template will be formatted like this:

{banners:group="homepage",banner="side01"} (this coding is for 2.5.3)

Lets get started. Hopefully by showing you some of the steps I will be taking, it will give you enough info to understand the best way to manage your banners/ads and content.

HOMEPAGE.TPL

By far your home page is the most important page on your site. If you applied this tutor to your homepage only, it may be enough to help double your revenue. As a benefit to managing your ads, we are going to be able to vary our content to keep the content changing for search engine spiders.

Lets look at my homepage as of this writing.

The areas I highlighted above are some of the areas I may want to consider managing for ad blindness. As you can see in the image, I have two horizontal ads at the top and one ad on the side. I also highlighted the content area for coding.

It helps to have a basic understanding of how vldPersonals templates are laid out to take advantage of ad placement.

When a visitor looks at your home page, they are actually seeing more than one template: header.tpl, footer.tpl and homepage.tpl. Any content displayed in the header.tpl or footer.tpl will be displayed on every page of your site. The header.tpl also has the coding for any sidebar content that may be displayed throughout your site. Don't make the mistake of taking the easy way out by displaying ALL your ads in the header and footer only - you will not optimize your ads if you take this route. If you want to display an ad on the side, you really only have one choice and that is to place it in the header.tpl between the sidebar coding.

The visitor sees your home page as one page and does not realize it is broken up into several templates. For managing ads, I will use the visitor's perspective of what a home page is, not the developers.

It should not be too hard to guess what I'm going to name my  banner ad group to manage my ads for my home page (remember, I'm looking at my home page through a visitor's eyes).

1. Go to CP - Content - Manage banners - Create group

I'm going to create a group called: Homepage with the label called homepage (note that the group name and label are the same name with the group name starting with a capital letter and the label name in all lower case).

2. Now within the group Homepage, I need to create my banners. I will name my banners based on their position or the type of banner being displayed on the home page. I also need to somehow group these banners within the banner group named Homepage. I will use a numbering system to do so.

For example. Within the Banner group Homepage, I will have 4 banners ending with 01. Here is the name and label of each:

Top01 - top01
Topp01 - topp01
Side01 - side01
Content01 - content01

Just like banner groups, the banner name and label name are the same with the banner name beginning with a capital letter and the label name in all lower case lettering. Notice in the above naming scheme, all names  end with the number 01. This makes it easier to know which banners should be active together. Note that in the above, Content01 is not a banner, but content only. This will help keep content changing for search engine spiders.

I will be displaying 3 ads on the home page.

Now that we have created our banners, we need to place the appropriate coding in the home page (in this case homepage.tpl and header.tpl -- again, I'm looking at the home page through the eyes of a visitor).

Summary

Lets summarize what we have done to this point using images.

Now that you see how I created and setup my banner group, plus how we displayed the banners/ads within the banner group, lets look at the banner coding within the homepage.tpl and header.tpl templates (remember, I'm looking at this through the eyes of the visitor). Note that this will not be the final coding. I'm just bringing you up to date to where we are in the tutor.

[size=18]02 Ads[/size]

Now that we have the 01 ads created under the Homepage Banner Group, we need to create alternate 02 ads under the same group. Here is how we will name and label the ads:

Top02 - top02
Side02 - side02
Content02 - content02
Right02 - right02

Just like the 01 ads, I will be displaying 3 ads on the home page. The Content02 contains content only. The difference between Content01 and 02 is they are worded and formatted differently. Giving search engines fresh content to crawl and more keywords to have my site indexed on.

In the above image, all my banners are under the Homepage Banner Group. With Ramil's change, I can now easily alternate my ads and content on my home page. Maybe for 1 week, I will have the 01 banners and content active. The following week the 02 banners and content active. I can alternate between 01 and 02 banners so members and search engines do not become blind to my home page. When time permits, I may add a 03, 04, etc to have even more versatility.

Also, vldP will monitor the clicks and CTR of each ad. This way I can test which ads do best.  In short, I can use this method to find out which ads perform best on my site. My only wish is that I could re-set the counter so all ads start out with 0 for comparison. Maybe I can do it through phpmyadmin.

Lets look at an example of some of my coding

Everything is in place. Of course we don't have to stop here. We can do the same thing for other templates, add more banners to the Homepage Banner Group I created, etc.

Lets look at two images showing the difference of my home page depending on which banners are active -- 01 or 02.

[size=24]HOMEPAGE WHEN 01 IS ACTIVE[/size]

[size=24]HOMEPAGE WHEN 02 IS ACTIVE[/size]

That's it. Sorry for the lengthy tutor. There are many ways to improve Banner management in vldP. It would be vastly improved if it mimic how adsense manages ads, but I will save that thought for another time.

Good Luck.

Pictures
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules]---» Select group [Pictures]
Enable pictures [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Avatars
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules]---» Select group [Avatars]
Maximum size of a photo (kb)
[Submit]

Videos
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules]---» Select group [Videos]
Enable videos [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Chat
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Chat]
Enable chat [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Blogs
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Blogs]
Enable blogs [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Guest books
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Guestbooks]
Enable guestbooks [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Private Messaging
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Messaging]
Enable private messaging [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Gifts
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Gifts]
Enable gifts [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Friends
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Friends]
Enable friends [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Favorites
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Favorites] -
Enable favorites [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Visitors
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Visitors]
Enable visitors [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Blocked
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Blocked]
Enable blocking members [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Events
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Events]
Enable events [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

Profiles
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [Profiles]
Show members status  [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

BBCode
In the Control Panel
[Settings] ---» under the "Options" menu---» [Member modules] ---» select group [BBcode]
Enable BBcode support [Yes] or [No]
[Submit]

When you signed up for a hosting package, it  includes an email server to take care of your website email tasks. If your hosting package is a shared server, it could be your email problems are related to someone who resides on your shared host IP address that you inherited at no fault of your own. Also, hosts don't always provide the best spam filters for your inbox.

If you think you are having email problems with your host, one option to consider is to change your email server to google servers. You get fast email service and a great spam filter  for FREE. 

The following video shows you how to sign up and change your MX records on your server for google. In this case, my host is hostmonster. Instructions for your host may be slightly different but the following is a good guide since most hosts follow very similar instructions. While watching the video, recommend pausing the video to read the instructions if they pass by too quickly.

[center][/center]

If you need to sign up for google apps click this link:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

Once you have you changed your MX records to google apps, don't forget the following:

1. Update your vldPersonal script to reflect the new email address (it will be a gmail address created by google apps).

2. If you have more than one domain, you do NOT have to create a new google app account for each domain. You can add a new domain to your primary google apps account as an alias.

3. Firefox has a great add on you can use for checking your email in google apps

4. If you have outlook express you can also configure it to use google apps.

Note the above 4 points are not that difficult to do. If you do make google apps your email server and need further help, let me know.

Now that google apps is setup as my email server, I will show you how I use with vldPersonals in screen shots below.

To log in to google apps use the following URL:

https://www.google.com/a/filipina-lady.net/ (replace filipina-lady.net with your URL)

Note: if you watched the above video, when you signed up for google apps, it asked you what domain you wanted to use. Hence, you will now use that domain when you login to your google apps (note: there is a firefox addon that makes logging in faster - I will show you in screen shot).

I should of explained better in the image below why you would want to use an alias. If you have more than one domain, you do NOT have to create an account for each domain. Instead you can add an alias domain to your primary account so all your domains use one account as their email server. There is nothing stopping your from creating a new google apps account for each domain, but the less accounts I have to remember the better.

You can also setup your outlook express to use google apps. I did not cover at this time. If you use firefox and add the add on for managing google apps, you may never need to use outlook express again. However, if someone really wants to use outlook express, let me know and I will explain the settings when time permits.

Login to your control panel.

Goto content >manage pages

In the name section type the name of the link that you want to show up.

Give it a label to go along since you need that.

Scroll down to custom tag and put the word header in it. This makes the link visible on the header section of your website.

Now in the field where it says page click on the box and in the right corner click on html, it's the little blue symbol to the right and insert the following into the box that pops up.

<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="2; URL=www.where you want to go here/">

Where it says content="2 that is how long till it redirects to that page. In the url= enter the webpage that you want it to forward to.

I thought this might be helpful to some people so I posted it.

1. First of all go and find some good zodiac icons. Free or paid.
Here's a couple of useful links in case you don't know how to use Google:
http://roundpixel.org/?p=69, Free zodiac icons by Ken Saunders

If you are too lazy take these resized Ken Saunders' icons I'm using in the tutorial.

2. Go to your vldP Control panel -> Settings -> Custom fields and create new custom field 'zodiac' under General group. And locate it under Age field cause it makes sense.

3. Rename your icons using this pattern: zodiac_[item_id].png (or gif depending on your file):

Renaming files you must set your own item ids you've got creating field at step 2.
Place files to your template's media folder.

4. Open your member_profile.tpl (member's profile page template) and account_home.tpl (My profile or My page template) and find code:
<div class="datainfo"> (which is right before
<!-- INCLUDE member_sections_name.tpl -->)

and make it look like:
<div class="datainfo" style="background: url('{virtual_tpl_path}{session.template}/media/zodiac_{profile_field_zodiac_value_id}.png') no-repeat 200px 10px;">

5. Test and enjoy!

This is result I've got.

P.S.: We could be using 'icon_Libra.png' and link to it as {profile_field_zodiac_value}.png but in that case no multi language would be supported. "Id has no nationality " (c) Me

P.P.S.: We could be using <img src="{virtual_tpl_path}{session.template}/media/zodiac_{profile_field_zodiac_value_id}.png" alt="{profile_field_zodiac_value}" border="0" /> instead of styles but that would break your design layout by putting lots of space to profile fields.

Next time I'll tell you how to automate zodiac selection depending on birthday.

This text was originally posted on vldCrowd

Step 1
Download the language pack you want from the Downloads area.
Unzip the language pack.
Upload  the language pack folder to your 'includes/languages' folder.
Note: the language pack folder is the folder with language name only.

Step 2
Activate your new language.
In the control panel:
Settings----»Languages
Select the “un-installed” icon to install your new language.

Step 3
Set your site default language
in the control panel:
Settings---» Select group---» Localizations
System language---- »select your default site Language
Override members language [No]
[submit]

Step 4
Now that you've installed the language pack, set your site default language and allowed your members to change the site language, you need a front-end interface (switch) to translate your site to the new language.

There are many ways you to allow members to translate your site.
Create a new link and place it in your header.tpl or wherever you want the link to appear.

Here are 3 examples of translation interface
Example1
for  word links:

<a href="{virtual_path}?language=english">English</a> |
<a href="{virtual_path}?language=spanish">Espanol</a>

Example 2
for image links:

<a href="{virtual_path}?language=english">
<img border="0" src="{virtual_path}templates/your_template/media/flag1.gif" width="20" height="20"></a>

 
<a href="{virtual_path}?language=spanish">
<img border="0" src="{virtual_path}templates/your_template/media/flag.2" width="20" height="20"></a>

***Please Note***
Where flag1.gif and flag2.gif are flag images uploaded to your 'templates/your_template/media' folder
Or you may use the flag images in your 'media/flags' folder

Example 3
for drop-down menu

<form name="jump">
<select name="menu" onChange="location=document.jump.menu.options[document.jump.menu.selectedIndex].value;" value="GO">
<option value="{virtual_path}">Translate</option>
<option value="{virtual_path}?language=english">English</option>
<option value="{virtual_path}?language=spanish">Espanol</option>
</select>
</form>

Now your members can translate your site with just one mouse click.

here is the mod. it displays what user enter when registering

open account_profile.tpl
search for:
<!-- BEGIN profile_fields -->

before add:

<!-- Mod to prevent user to change gender-->
<dt>I am</dt><dd> {session.profile_gender1}</dd>

Don't forget to change custom fields in your cp so that gender won't be shown on profil.

I much prefer TinyMCE, and fortunately, changing from NiceEdit (not so nice I think) to TinyMCE is very easy.

Below: NiceEdit

Below: TinyMCE

Apart from familiarity, it offers more options and functionality, and functions (I believe personally) in a better way than NiceEdit.

Want to give it a try?

First, download the jQuery version of TinyMCE.
Rather than trying to find your way around the TinyMCE download area, to make it easier, you can get it here.

Unpack this archive, into your root/includes directory, so it's installed as follows:
public_html/includes/tiny_mce
(there will be further subdirectories under the tiny_mce directory, but they don't need our attention.)

Now, open the file /includes/templates/header.tpl
Around line 15, find and DELETE the entry
<script type="text/javascript" src="{virtual_path}includes/js/nicedit.js"></script>
That's right, delete it, erase it, cast it into cyber space.

Now, still in /includes/templates/header.tpl paste the following, just about where you deleted the other line.

<script type="text/javascript" src="{virtual_path}includes/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
tinyMCE.init({
    mode : "textareas",
    plugins : "inlinepopups",
    dialog_type : "modal",
    theme : "advanced",
    theme_advanced_buttons1 : "save,newdocument,|,bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull,|,styleselect,formatselect,fontselect,fontsizeselect",
    theme_advanced_buttons2 : "cut,copy,paste,pastetext,pasteword,|,search,replace,|,bullist,numlist,|,outdent,indent,blockquote,|,undo,redo,|,link,unlink,anchor,image,cleanup,help,code,|,insertdate,inserttime,preview,|,forecolor,backcolor",    
    theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
    theme_advanced_statusbar_location : "bottom",
    theme_advanced_resizing : true
});
</script>

You can now save and close /includes/templates/header.tpl

Now, all you need to do is modify two template files:
/includes/templates/pages_edit.tpl
and
/includes/templates/news_edit.tpl

(  if you have my vldArticles mod, then you would also have to change
/includes/templates/articles_edit.tpl  )

Towards the bottom of the files you will find an entry such as this:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function(){
        new nicEditor({
            iconsPath: '{virtual_path}includes/js/nicicons.gif',
            buttonList: 
        }).panelInstance('field_body');
    });
</script>

Delete this entire selection, close and save your files, and voila, you should now have a much better textarea editor than NiceEdit.

Cheers

NEW HOST

When you sign up for a new host, they will probably send you a Welcome Email with passwords and instructions. One of the first things you will want to do before getting started with the steps below is pointing your URLs from your old host to your new host. It is something that most can do on their own, but if not, contact your host. Here is the basic steps.

1. Log in to your old host cpanel

2. There should be an area to manage your domains. In my case, there is a tab called Name Servers.

3. For each domain I own (I have 9) I had to change the Name Server from my old host to my new host. Normally the new host's Welcome email will tell you what the Name Servers are called. You will type in the Name Servers of your new host for each domain you own in your old host's domain manger. How exactly you accomplish this on your host may be different than mine, but usually it is pretty obvious where you change the Name Servers.

4. Propagation is the process of your domain transferring from your old host to your new host. This can take anywhere from a few hours to 24 hours. If you want to check out how things are going,  here is link you can use to check your propagating process - http://www.whatsmydns.net/

What you are looking for, is the new IP address of your new host. If you check and see the IP address of your old host, than your domain is still pointing to your old server. Once you see your new host IP address, than you know your domain is pointing to your new server.

5. You can also check to see if your site is propagating for your ISP by using windows ping or lookup command.

-- In windows click Run
-- Type cmd
-- Next type ping yourdomain.com or type nslookup yourdomain.com

If you see your site propagating by using the link in step 4 above, but hours later your  ISP is still showing your old host's ISP, recommend you turn off your computer, unplug your modem and any network hub you are using to network, to clear your ISP cache.  I would leave the computer off and modem/network turned off for at least 10 minutes before turning it on and plugging things back in.

6. You may also have to create what they call a DNS Zone for each domain on your new host. Again, instructions should of been provided by your new host. If not, contact them.

When you decide to proceed with the following steps depends on rather you want to wait until your domain name has propagated to your new server or you can jump right in if you have adequate instructions from your hosts on how to access your new and old hosts cpanels, how to ftp, etc. I jumped right in. Nothing says you have to do the following in the order listed.

MOVING FILES

Moving files is not that difficult with one possible exception and that is your media folder. Before I get into the steps, let me say I'm using vldP version 2.5.3. I believe starting with 2.5.5, the file structure of the media (audio, images, video) folder changed and ftp may not be an issue. With 2.5.3 and prior, all media was saved under one folder called upload. My upload folder had tons of files. This caused  ftp issues when I would copy files from my host to my local drive. If you use a ftp programs (I use several but FileZilla at http://filezilla-project.org/ is one of the best and it is free) to copy a large media folder from your host to your local drive,  I can guarantee you that you will not move all your media with a ftp program. The following steps is what I recommend for moving files.

1. On your old host, copy (ftp) all your vldP files from your sever to your local drive. As far as the media folder (read above paragraph), if you do not have that much media, there should be no issue copying the folder to your local drive. If your media folder has a lot of files there may be an issue (later I will recommend how to solve).

2. On your new host, recommend uploading your vldP files to the same file structure you used on your old host. If you had vldP installed in the root of the old host, upload to the root of the new host. If you had vldP installed in a folder at your old host, create a folder with the same name on your new host and upload to it.

3. Config.php. Make sure you do not delete or change the config.php that you copied from your old host. Later you may have to make changes, but for now, just make sure you don't accidently delete it.

4. Media Folder. Ok, You read everything I said above about media folder. Lets assume you are having problems with copying your media folder to your local drive by ftp. Again you won't get any ftp errors, but after you upload your media folder to your new host, you discover images are missing. There is a good chance ftp didn't copy all your media files to your local drive.  Here is what I did:

-- In my old host CPANEL, I would use the backup command

-- There are several ways to backup. The important thing is to use the backup that will copy all files, including your media folder, to your local drive. By using the backup command, you will ensure that all media files have been downloaded to your local drive. In my hosts cpanel, I use the Home Directory backup (see image below). I could of used the Full Backup, but that is overkill - backs up all my files plus all cpanel files. If you are not sure, ask your old host which backup command to use to back up all your files. Also, if you have a lot of files, you may want to do the back up when you are not using your computer -- I do it before going to bed and leave it backup during the night.

Now that I have all of the media files on my local drive, I can use my ftp program to upload my media files.

NOTE: When uploading to a new host, I usually have no issues with ftp. The only time I have ftp issues is when I try to download (copy)  the content of the media folder to my local drive when the media folder is large. That is why I use my cpanel backup command to copy my files to my local drive and then use ftp to upload my media folder to my new host.

5. Permissions. Now that you have all your files, including media files, on your new host, it is time to check your permissions.  Besides my vldP files, I also made sure my ioncube folder, my htaccess and php.ini files were uploaded to my new host. The permissions you check are the same ones you checked when you installed vldP. Installation/Permission Instructions

TO ALL GURU'S WHO WILL MENTION SSH -- I agree, if you have SSH use it, but if not or you don't know what SSH is, than don't bother with it. My old host did not have SSH capability or they did not give me permission to use it.

CREATING DATABASE AND USER ON NEW HOST

1. I was lucky and was able to create the same database and username that I used on my old host to my new host including the same prefix. Many of you may be able to create the same name, but your new host's prefix may be different. It isn't a big deal if you can't create the same name as your old host, we just got to remember to change the config.php file to reflect the new name. I will discuss config.php later.

2. Exporting. We need to export the database from the old host. We are going to use phpmyadmin to export to our local drive.

The image below should help you set the settings to export your database. I highlited in green the important settings.

-- After you have selected the database (see above image), select the Export tab.
-- Make sure to click"select all" to select all tables and  check the sql format to export
-- Under Structure - be sure to select the settings you see in the image highlited in green
-- Under Data - be sure to select the settings you see in the image highlited in green
-- Be sure you have the "Save as file" selected with a check mark and "gzipped" as your format
-- When everything is set, click the Go button to export the database to your local drive.

3. Importing. Ok, now that we have exported the database from our old host to our local drive, it is time to import the old database to the new database we created in step 1 above on our new host.

CONFIG.PHP

Your config.php contains your configuration for your site. It is usually under the includes folder. In the above steps, I talked about keeping the same file structure and names from your old host on your new host, but if things did not quite work out, good chance you will need to make some changes to your config.php. Before making those changes, be sure to backup the old one and keep it in a safe place. Once you know you have a working config.php for your site, you will want to make another copy of that working copy and keep in safe place.

After you made your changes and uploaded the config.php to your new host, I would double check the config.php permission to be sure it is correrct.

READY, SET, GO

Ok we now cross our fingers, and type in the URL for our site. If all went well, we say yea, if not, we say CACHE. If you did everything correctly but something went wrong, the first I thing I would do is clear cache. Go to your includes/cache folder on your new host and clear it out and try again.

VLDP LICENSE

Even though you have a valid license, you may still see an error saying your license is not valid. I'm still not sure I have this whole licensing thing down pat. It took me a few tries to get licensing straight, but once I did, I was up and running. Here is the scoop.

You will have to log in to your vldP Client area and click the My Product link. There you should see a list of your license. Click the license you are using for the vldP you uploaded to your new host. The license number in your vldP Product area should match the license number in your config.php. You can use only one license per vldP installed. There are some exceptions I will talk about later.

In the above screen, you click the "Reissue License" button. After you click it, you must clear the includes/cache folder for the vldP you uploaded to the new host.

For whatever reason, it took me a few tries to get things straight. I was moving 3 vldP sites to the new host and it could be that I was just tired and not paying attention. But it did take me several tries to get my licenses matched up with the right vldP config file for each copy I owned. If you do have problems, check your config.php file and make sure the license you are "Reissuing" matches. If you have the right license number in your config.php for the license you are trying to reissue, all I can say is to try again by pushing the "Reissue License" button, clear the includes/cache again and keep trying until it works out. Like I said, it took me several tries.

Obviously if you tried more times than you can count and still are not getting it to work, it is time to put in a help ticket at vldP help desk.

VLDP LICENSE EXCEPTIONS

I asked vlad about using the same license more than once for testing and he said you could as long you installed the test copy of vldP in a folder called test. Here is how it works.

If I have  vldP installed under my root at asian-wife.net, I could create a folder under the root called test, install vldP in the test folder and use the same license I used for asian-wife.net  for the vldP I installed in the test folder.

Another example: Lets say I have my main vldP installed in a folder called dating. The path to my main vldP is root/dating/. In this case, if I want to install a test copy than I would have to install the test folder under the dating folder. The path for my test folder would be root/dating/test.

TESTING

Ok, you have vldP installed on your new host. There are no cache or license problems and things seem to be running ok or are they?? It is time to test. I'm not big into testing, for that matter I hate it, but it is a necessary evil.

A good example is my recent experience. I had my sites running on my new host and all seem to be working well. I created a test member (by the way, if you have a folder named test, do not create a member in vldP called test). I called my test member "asiantest", logged in and went to create a blog as asiantest and I got a fatal error message -- oh my!

This is why you have the debug=1 in your config.php file when testing. If it was set as debug=0 (default setting) and I did the blog test, I would of got a blank screen with no error message. But with debug=1 set in my config.php, I got a error message. I copied the error message and sent it to my host. They knew what the problem was and fixed it. Can you imagine if I said to my host "I get a blank screen when I create a blog". They probably would of scratched their head and told me to contact vlad which in turn vlad would of told me to change my debug to debug=1 and tell him what the error said.

So lesson learn is if you have a problem and not sure what it is, try changing your debug in your config.php file to debug=1 to see if you  get an error message to send to the experts so they can figure out what is wrong. Don't forget to change your debug back to 0 when you are done testing.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

All my sites are now on my new host and things are up and running. There were some minor tweaking but other than that, things seem to be as they should. Don't forget about your emails. If you changed hosts and got new emails addresses, you may have to update your email settings in your vldP Control Panel.

Good Luck.

First attempt:

1) Signed up for Amazon S3 (simple storage system) and moved all my site graphics and banners up to it. Changed links on my banners to point to my S3 bucket. Not impressed with the speed as the latency seemed higher at times than from my VPS server.

2) Decided to sign up for Amazon Cloud Front and try serving the images from their network if edge servers. This proved incredibly easy and I could see an improvement on my site page load speeds. To do this I did the following:

a) Created a new CloudFront Distribution using my S3 bucket.
b) Associated the distribution to a CNAME cache.mysite.com
c) created CNAME record in my DNS of: cache.mysite.com pointing to the URL of the distribution in step a.
d) changed link to images to point to cache.mysite.com

Now all my static images (logos, banners, etc) are being served from Amazon edge servers around the world. Within a couple of hours I saw servers in the US, Europe, Japan, and Singapore serving my images. I could see a decrease in page loading time as well. Again, nothing I had to do but kinda cool.

I then wanted to look into having all my members images served from the cloud as I felt I would see a better return by doing this. Initially I though I was was going to have to code in their API (which I still plan on doing) but in the short term found a quick way to do this that so far seems to work.

a) created a new CloudFront Distribution using my current server as the origin server instead of an S3 bucket.

origin server: www.mysite.com
CNAME: images.mysite.com

b) created CNAME record in my DNS of: images.mysite.com pointing to the URL of the distribution in step a.

c) I then changed the virtual_pic_path in my vld config file to use images.mysite.com instead of www.mysite.com

All member profile images, thumbnails, uploaded pics are now being served by the amazon edge servers around the globe.

NOTE: and this may be important! I did some basic testing on my site and so far these changes do not appear to have affected anything in a negative way. I am not and cannot say for sure that the change in step c above was an OK one to make. Still very possible I broke something I have not discovered yet. Page load time is definitely improved though!

Doing some basic calculations using my highest traffic month to date (~ 6GB transfers) it looks like all in all this will cost me at most around 1.00 - 2.00 a month but probably less. I can live with that for the speed increase I am seeing so far.

Next up I want to look into their API and if there would be any benefit to using that.

and think about I write this tutorial only for beginners so don´t think I´m stupid then I explain the tutor step by step for the beginners ... please you must wait for the next tutorials for the more advanced members

okey now we start the tutorial ...

1. the best and easiest way is to duplicate a template ... from vldpersonal ...
( and you must know every time vldpersonal have a update you must do this change manually on yours templates)
2. first you must have write down on a paper that colors you will have on your site ...don´t ignore it !!!
( webdesigner write down on a paper that colors images and change they will have before they make a new templates or they don´t but then it take very long time to make a templates ...)

that should I think about before I start
don´t worry about  this I will explain it all for you later ...

a. that images/text logo you will have (maybee you need to make a new one on photoshop)
b. should I have headerimage/headercolors ... or only make it with css ... or both
c. should I have backgrundsimage/backgroundscolors ... or only make it with css ... or both
d. should I have sidebarsimage/sidebarscolors ... or only make it with css ... or both
e. should I have footerimage/footercolors ... or only make it with css ... or both

and now how the templates is build
* the template is build in this way ...*
------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------
*header on the top 
*sidebar on the left or right
*content on the middle
*footer on the bottom
------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------

some other thing you need to think about
1. will you have different frontpage for logged in members and logged out members ...
2. maybee you need a nice background behind your site templates ...
3. that colors you need I recommend red/pink blue/gray colors in the templates (pastelcolors)
4. you maybee need more functions you can change from controlpanel ...
5. should you have text buttons or real buttons ...
6. do you need a shoutbox (chat) in the frontpage ...
7. slideshow of your members profile pictures ...
8. and this is the most important ... you must get your site being attractive for your members ...
( that I mean is a nice logo and a nice header images it make your site being more attractive ... )
9. make a help page so members can send you a question and get a answer ( from controlpanel )
I´m testing a new flipbook I have done just now and will see that my members like it ...

I´m so sorry have so much to do but soon soon I´m back and make the ending of this tutorial.