Bridging Help Please

[TetonTrekker]

I'm a PHP sophomore, a CSS senior, and a SMF freshman. (I'm self taught so I don't always get the terms correct) I work with a version of Dreamweaver that is about 10 years old so I end up hand coding most everything. I use Godaddy, Mozilla, & XP Pro.

I host an alumni site. It is an alias of my main site, the entire site is a folder in the root of my main site. I put the forum at the root of my main site also, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have never tried bridging before, did not know I would want it, loaded Coppermine and read the instructions yesterday. Oh phooey, I think I should have structured things differently.

This is the structure:
main site (www.mainsite.com)
/alumnisite (www.alumnisite.com)
/SMF Forum (forum.alumnisite.com)
/Coppermine (gallery.alumnisite.com)

Will bridging work? the way I read it is "maybe". I just loaded Coppermine yesterday, I could unload and reload in a different directory.

Any suggestions on me getting around my own bad planning? Anyone's insight would be helpful at this point.

THANK YOU in advance
~J

[Kindred]

I believe that the coppermine/smf bridge requires a specific structure of directories, but I can not recall what that actually is...

If you continue to want to use coppermine, you may have to alter the structure that you have.
Alternatively, you could use something other than coppermine (like gallery2 or one of the gallery mods)

[TetonTrekker]

(like gallery2 or one of the gallery mods)

Thanks for the quick reply.

Coppermine was offered by Godaddy, it had OK reviews, and did what I want it to do.  But I'm not married to it. I don't remember if Godaddy had Gallery2, I'll have to look.

I could not find a gallery mod that would do what I want. I need  something that I can use for photo management on the entire site, not just the forum, I need categories, folders, and sub folders. I have various photos from scanned yearbooks to sports to marching band and want a way for people who scanned yearbooks to load them while still having full control of where things land. (then my big job, switching my site from SSI to PHP)

Plus I'm having problems with many of the mods not passing the install test and it's getting old. It may be a newbie error and I have not asked for help with it until I'm feeling comfortable with SMF. Now I'm wondering if it is my structure causing that. grrrr.

I could drag the entire SMF folder into the alumni site folder physically but I was not sure how much recoding it would require. Any idea?

Thanks Again,
~J

[Kindred]

no recoding needed...   you just have to change the directory and url settings in Settings.php and then run repair_settings.php to reset the directories/base urls in the database

Personally, I prefer Menalto's gallery2 to Coppermine. Also, don't marry yourself to only what goDaddy has "on tap". Installing gallery2 is as simple as downloading the install file and running the installation on your server.
(plus, Oldiesmann has a bridge/mod-bridge for SMF-Gallery2.)

[TetonTrekker]

GREAT! THANK YOU! (Sometimes I tend to over think things.)

I'll google Gallery2 prior to using coppermine. You have been super helpful!

Thank you,

~J
(Now I need to quit obsessing over smf and get back to my paid job)

[TetonTrekker]

Perhaps over thinking and veering off topic... definitely obsessing... when I move the directory I don't want to get rid of the sub-domain address, I had a bunch of people bookmark it. On one of my non profit websites that I coded myself I added a meta in the header to make everything relative to the website path, not the sub-domain. SMF is far more complex than my little sites. Is it something that is built in? If not can I add it without breaking anything else? Or am I better off doing a redirect? I suppose this would be easy to figure out once i get home and can work on it but asking someone with experience will probably save me hours of trial and error.

I very much appreciate you letting me pick your brain,
~J

[Kindred]

I believe that you can re-point the subdomain in your server's cpanel/admin tool.

just be sure to set subdomain independent cookies to ON in the smf admin

[TetonTrekker]

just be sure to set subdomain independent cookies to ON in the smf admin

This is the info I needed. Thank you. Part of my prob with being self taught is that if I don't know the term I can't look up the instructions.

Thanks AGAIN you are very helpful.
~J

[TetonTrekker]

Hey, THANKS. I switched everything over last night and it was relatively painless.  Except the part where I chose to use my laptop, got Happy Fingers on the touch pad, put an extra dot in the URL, and did not notice until it was too late.

I loaded Gallery but Coppermine had more of the functions I need for my purposes so I stuck with that. If I could take the best parts of both it would have been great. Coppermine is not perfect either, but time to move forward.

Everything is working great, the bridge is working perfectly.

Thanks Again for your help, I could not have done it without you.
~J
forum.azusaalumni.com