Guestbooks provide a basic functionality to allow site users, anonymous or not (your option), to sign — just like when you visit a museum, wedding party, anniversary, or whatever.  xfGuestBook provides a robust set of features for this functionality.

xfGuestBook | Latest Version: 2.50 |
Author: theCat - WebSite

Overview

It provides fairly robust guestbook functionality as well as a location feature with an administrator configurable collection of locations (with images) from which the user may select . Provided are several sets of flags and maps of world, us, countries and states. You can upload your own location sets.

Features

• Sign Guest Book
  • Moderate Signatures (optional)
  • Anonymous or Registered
  • E-mail: No, Optional, Required
  • Image Verification (optional) (like CAPTCHA)
    
  • Gender (only male/female/not specified)
  • Send Admin E-mail (optional)
  • Location (with image); packs already available
  • Show avatar/rank (optional)
  • URL (optional, registered only)
  • Image upload (with max size) (optional)
• Administration
  • Moderation by IP
  • Approve
  • Delete
  • Delete orphaned images
  • Email alerts (optional)
  • Locations with images
• Search signatures

Enhancements Needed

• Real Name instead of Username (I modified mine per notes below)
• Remove HTML from Functional Layer (too hard to make display changes via Smarty Templates); I did some of this for my implemented version
  
• Option to prevent registered users (and/or anonymous users matching some criteria such as e-mail address) from signing more than once
• Gender Identification: allow Unspecified/None as a user entry; allow management of entries such as Transgender, Identity, Questioning, and others as desired.
• Signature ID# needs to be used instead of just a numerical counting.
• Option to choose groups to send notification to.
• $flagsperrow isn't defined when displaying by gender (I modified per below)
• Need ability to define less than 4 flags/row
• Name links to userinfo page if they are actually a registered user. Anonymous users don't get the links, but should. Maybe this is a feature?

Installation

Installation is easy enough. I modified all the language files of course and set the preferences to my desires and edited the templates.

Modifications and Bugs

Use Real Name

If logged in, when signing the guestbook, this module uses your login name (aka username). For security reasons, I separate the two, and call the Real Name the Display Name, and want to use that instead. Thus, I had to modify code: in xfcreate.php, lines 176 and 229, change uname to name.

Summary Tables

I wanted more control over the layout of the summary tables and signatureinformation. Because a lot of HTML information is embedded in the functional layer, I had to modify the code that created the $gender, $location, and $msg information (in index.php).

FlagsPerRow Undefined for Gender List

When displaying the page based on gender, $flagsperrow is undefined (only defined when showing location (aka country). I added the definition line from xfgb_countrylist to the xfgb_genderlist function to fix.

Changed Pages

• index.php
• xfcreate.php

Image Upload

I can't upload images due to an incorrect mimetypes error. I was having this somewhere else, too, so I'm not sure if it's system-wide or something else. I'll need to look into this further.

Bad Img URLs

The URLs for the gender img tag was not closed, so I had to fix that. Since it's in the code and not the templates, it required fixes to the functional layer.

Other Notes

My understanding is that this is a xoopsForge module (thus the xf at the beginning of the name). I also tried a couple of others:

• myGuestBook 1.4: less configurability; adds several additional text fields (defaulted to IMs)
• SnX GuestBook 0.1.9: failed on SQL installation; didn't try further

There is also a graphical GuestBook Maps, but I haven't played with it yet. Sounds interesting.