This and other scripts mentioned in the post can be found in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the code of the html page for the presence of forum engine signatures in it. We used a similar technique when defining WordPress and Joomla, but there are a couple of differences. First, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows you to load the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several analyzers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script, the presence of a signature is 100% a sign of the engine. Last time the presence of a signature only gave weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the highest weight "won". I decided that in this case, this approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

To test how the script works, I did a little research. I made a list of several thousand forums and ran each of them through my script, thereby determining the percentage of program triggers and the popularity of various engines.

I used my google parser to get a list of forums. Search engine requests were sent like

site: forum. *. ru
site: talk. *. ru
site: board. *. ru
site: smf. *. ru
site: phpbb. *. ru
....

etc. The complete code of the query generator can be found in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl... In addition to the .ru zone ,.su .ua .kz and.by were also used. It was difficult to do this research last time, since WordPress and Joomla sites do not have such signatures in the URL. Catalogs like cmsmagazine.ru/catalogue/ do not provide a sufficient sample size. What are 600 Drupal sites?

I must admit, the results of the experiment upset me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, only 7083 were successfully identified with the engine, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I missed some engine? Was Bitrix really on half of the forums? Or should I spend more time looking for signatures? In general, more research is required here.

Among 56% of successfully identified engines, the most popular, as expected, were IPB (31%), phpBB (26.6%) and vBulletin (26.5%)

They are closely followed by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB was only in 6th place (1.64%). I would not recommend strongly trusting these figures (they say, every third forum in RuNet works on IPB), but, of course, it is possible to draw certain conclusions.

For example, if you intend to create a website on a forum engine and plan to modify the forum, say, pay users $ 0.01 for each message with automatic withdrawal of funds once a week, then you should choose one of the three most popular engines. The more popular a forum is, the more likely it is to find a programmer who is well versed in it.

If no significant changes in the engine are foreseen, then it may make sense to choose not the most popular engine, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of automatically sent spam on it.

Scripts for searching / defining forums can also be found in more than one practical application. The first thing that came to my mind personally was to sort the identified forums by TCI and place on the first hundred posts with links to one of their sites. However, a hundred forum dofolllow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are interested in transitions.

It is clear that the named use of scripts is far from the only one. I think you can easily figure out how else you can use them.

Hello dear readers of the blog site. So, we continue the topic of setting up a forum engine called SMF, started in a post about it. There we have not yet made the forum Russian, in terms of translation from the English interface. On this moment it does not look very presentable, but after Russification (if it has not yet been produced) and the creation of appropriate sections, its appearance will improve significantly.

Today we will consider the design themes and make it Russian, as well as install the JFusion component, which can work with both engines (both Joomla and SMF), which will allow us to have a common user base for two and just one form of their registration and login.

Themes and installation of the Russian language pack

Engine Simple Machines Forum supports the ability to change topics, moreover, they can be changed, both for the entire forum as a whole, and for its individual sections in particular. Personally, I used the default skin, but I made quite a few manual changes to it. In particular, I changed the background, color schemes of some elements, added a clock on the flash, radio and much more, which I will talk about in subsequent posts of this section.

Why didn't I use any of additional topics registration when creating a forum? Well, here, probably, it's all about my laziness. No, I was not too lazy to search and download new themes, since there are many places where this can be done. My laziness lies elsewhere.

The fact is that all the variety of mods for this engine, designed to expand its capabilities, is focused on the default theme. Let me explain. If you have a default theme, then adding one or another mod to SMF takes a few seconds and, as a rule, does not require manual editing of the code.

If you install a mod on a design theme different from the default, you will need, as they say, to process all unprocessed parts with a file. In other words, you will have to use FileZilla (you can download and configure it to access the site via FTP and open the files of your forum engine for editing, in which this mod makes changes.

Then look for the right place in the code and perform the necessary actions: either replace the code, or delete, or add a piece of code before or after the fragment you need. Considering that there may be about a dozen files to be changed, you can imagine how troublesome it will be. In this case, you need to be very careful and not make mistakes, because otherwise the forum may not open at all.

If all of the above problems of using a non-default theme do not scare you, then you can download them from here. The topics are sorted there by sections (minimalism, close to classical, modern, etc.) and for each of them you can see its screenshot at Full Screen... I will tell you how to install these very themes a little later.

If you did not russify the forum at the stage of uploading the engine files to the hosting, as described in the first part of this opus (see the link at the very beginning of the article), then you can do it now. The Russian language pack pre-downloaded from this page with the desired one, you need to unpack, and then copy the Themes folder to root folder where there is already a directory with the same name.

Upon completion of copying, you need to go to the forum using the administrator's username and password. Select "Admin" in the top menu, and then click on "Server Settings" in the left column.

In the window that opens, we find the item "Default Forum Language" and select the Russian language from the drop-down list, and then click on the "Save" button at the bottom of the page.

That's it, now your conference is completely in Russian.

Solving problems when installing mods that do not support Russian

Please note that in the future, when adding mods to SMF that do not have a Russian translation, you may sometimes have a problem with displaying mod settings in the admin panel. Actually, these same settings in the admin panel will simply not be visible, tk. there will be no Russification files for them. Therefore, you will have two options for solving this problem.

The first way is to switch to English for the entire forum. How this can be done, you can see a few paragraphs above. Accordingly, after you perform the necessary actions with these settings, you will need to return to Russian again.

The second method is more complicated, but it will allow us to see the settings of the installed mods in the admin panel always, and not only when activated of English language... I dwell on this point in such detail, because the question that someone has installed a mod and cannot find its settings in the admin panel of their conference is very common.

So, the second way is to add translation strings to the Russification files for the newly added mods. How to determine which Russification files need to be changed and where to get them, I will tell you later. For now, temporarily, you can use the first method.

Installing JFusion for Site and Forum Integration

First you will need to download JFusion and its Russification. Entering the Joomla admin panel, we perform standard actions: select from the top menu of the admin panel the items "Extensions" - "Install / Remove" - ​​"Download the package file" - the "Browse" button - find on your computer the file with the jfusion_package.zip component - click on the " Download file & Install> ".

After that, a window appears, informing that the component has been installed successfully. If you have problems, then you can familiarize yourself with the options for solving some of them at the link given just above.

Now it's the turn for Russification, which is added in the same way as the component itself. Those. we repeat the sequence of actions: "Extensions" - "Install / Remove" - ​​"Download the package file" - the "Browse" button - find the JFusion russification file on your computer - click on the "Download file & Install" button. Now we can go to the settings along the "Components" - "JFusion" path and make sure that the Russification has been successfully added and is working.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

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Configuring JFusion for Combine SMF forum and Joomla site
JFusion modules for displaying messages from the forum on the site, as well as creating a button in SMF to return to Jumla
Creating a menu item in Joomla to enter the forum and transferring user registration from SMF to the site
Installing SMF Forum - Integrating Joomla 1.5 and Simple Machines Forum with JFusion component
Extensions for Joomla - what is it and where to download components, modules and plugins for Joomla, how to install and uninstall them
Component K2 for creating blogs, catalogs and portals on Joomla - features, installation and russification Photo Gallery for Joomla - Part 3 - Creating galleries in Joomla 1.5 using Phoca Gallery component - adding categories and uploading images to the photo gallery
ARTIO JoomSEF - setting up CNC (SEF) links and Title in Joomla, as well as creating a 404 error page using this extension
Akeeba Backup (former JoomlaPack) - create a site backup on Joomla and restore from backup in two clicks

Everyone knows that I simply cannot live without Joomla, but, in my opinion, there is no good forum in components. That's why I work with forum engines. One of the new ones that I've just recently started using is Starting a New SMF Category, hopefully with some helpful material. We start small, and as a beginner, very useful.

First steps in search engine optimization Simple Machines Forum: remove copyright and external links

I'll make a reservation right away that I'm only working with smf 2 and this article will refer specifically to this version of the free forum engine.

And so, regular readers know how much I do not like to put on "10" external links to the official sites of engines, including forum ones. That is why, first of all, we delete the copyright and as many as 4, attention 4 external links of the form " SMF 2.0.2 | Simple Machines | SMF © 2011 | XHTML"! To do this, connect to the site via FTP forum / Themes / name of your theme/ and edit the file index.template.php... Naturally, at the very bottom is the code (about 330 lines), which is displayed by external links that we do not like so much. Therefore, we delete: "