RE: Dreamweaver forums

Hi Daniel,

The forum we are using now has been custom built. It needs to integrate with our 'delegate' and 'trainer' accounts, which allow the different accounts to access other specific web pages throughout the web site.

My recommendation would be to use one of the many free forums that have already been written for you, such as MyBB (or search google for 'free forum'). You'll need to have PHP and MySQL set up on your server for MyBB to work - ask your hosting provider. You'll most likely find that all the forums include an 'wizard' style installation process, that will help you, and tell you what you need to do to ensure the forum will work properly on your site.

The forum is then 'tacked on' to a directory within your web site (eg. www.yourdomain.com/forum)

To create a payment system, there are a few options. The easiest is to use something like PayPal, where you don't necessarily need a shopping card interface.

Otherwise, you would need to have a merchant account with a bank (to take the money) and a PSP (payment service provider) such as SecPay, which handles all the secure web stuff. You'll need to know a bit of programming (eg. php, asp, cgi) to implement this, or hire someone who can do it for you. But your PSP will most likely have a list of companies or people who can help you with this.

Then you would most likely require a shopping cart, or similar. If you don't want to program this yourself, try searching google for 'shopping cart software' or similar, and you should find plenty of pre-written carts that you can add to your site, and then administer the products/services available to your customers.

Not sure what you mean by 'member accounts' - the forum software would take care of that. If you want to create your own accounts for people to log in to your web site, you'd need a back-end database (such as MySQL, MSSQL) and link your site to this using server side programming languages such as php, asp, .net, cgi. Then people log in (usually using Session Variables and Cookies) and you can track where people go, and give them access to all their comments/posts/whatever they do on your site.

I hope this helps. Good luck, and let us know if you have further questions regarding Dreamweaver.

Regards, Rich

Linking to PDF files

Hi Daniel,

Sure!

Firstly, ensure you have the PDF file on your local computer - ensure you can open it and everything looks fine in Adobe Reader (or whatever you use to browse PDF files).

Do you have a folder for such files? If not, perhaps create a directory in your local root folder, called 'downloads', or similar. Then keep all your PDF files that you will make available to your users in that folder.

You will need to create the folder on your remote server too. You can use Dreamweaver to do this. Now ensure you have uploaded the PDF file to your remote server - again, you can use Dreamweaver to do this. The PDF file needs to be in your local site folder for you to be able to see it.

Now you should be able to guess the exact URL of where your PDF is located on your web site. For example, if you created a folder in your Asset folder, like such: /asset/downloads/, then your exact URL would be something like: http://www.yourdomain.com/asset/downloads/yourpdf.pdf

Type what you think the URL should be into your browser address bar, press enter, and your browser should ask you whether you want to Save As... or Open the file.

Keep in mind that people's browsers may ask them different things. Some browsers use themselves to open PDFs (a browser plug in). Others will save the file to a folder or desktop. Other browsers will prompt the user on what to do... it all depends on the preferences the user has got set in their own browser.

To link to the PDF, you just create a link in the same way you would link to a local HTML file. You can use Dreamweaver's Browse To File button, and locate the file in your local root folder.

The code would look something like this:
<a href="/asset/download/yourpdf.pdf">Download PDF File</a>

And that's about it. Test your link works.

If you're still having trouble, perhaps paste the URL of the page where your link is, and I can help you further.

Regards, Rich