Soon my home by Joomla!™

Next step at my home page is to publish my content , I thought in building it from scratch and adding content gradually, but another option that came from my friend Mohamed Saad is to use a CMS like Joomla!™ and only administrate [or may customize in] it

I remember his words when he said that CMS is saying to administrator you can customize every thing with just some clicks and the developer is valueless to your site

So with a CMS I can apply the principle of reusablity and with a CMS I can build a site from a simple home page to any large web solution

And if you are asking Joomla!™ exactly? That is because Joomla! Wins 'Best CMS Award' in 2007!

My domain has been born

Thanks God I've released my own domain http://mzidan.com

Really I've many blogs "about 9 now" but; while blogs are doing a great function to me they still miss some communication facilities which made me buy a domain and a hosting space.

I worked in many live sites before and deployed a lot of them, but I never saw the birth of any domain before.

I really enjoyed the birth of my domain and my hosting and I got a new piece of experience with the DNS and Exchange and how to link the domain with the hosting account. "I never imagined that http://www.domain.com is a sub domain or alias of http://domain.com", and it is very inserting to have a mail account like MyName@MyDomain.com.

I can see that this site will help me in my academic path and I will use it as a communication channel with my students and I hope I can release soon an evaluation form for sessions I do in the faculty.

Finally God Willing http://www.mzidan.com will have content

phpBB™ an Open Source forum solution

phpBB™ one of the most widely used Open Source forum solution. It has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

With a large and highly customizable set of key features coupled with a standards compliant interface, phpBB™ will grow with, and compliment your website. With millions of installations worldwide, it is no wonder phpBB™ is one of the most popular ways to create and support a community.

I have installed phpBB™ on my local machine and I really thank the open source community for providing the globe with this great script fro free.

I recommend any one new or old to PHP to install phpBB™ and navigate through the source code so that he can understand the logic of the forum sites.

This is the ACM online judge forum that run phpBB™

Smarty: Functions

Every Smarty tag either prints a variable or invokes some sort of function. These are processed and displayed by enclosing
the function and its attributes within delimiters like so: {funcname attr1='val1' attr2='val2'}.

Example function syntax

{config_load file='colors.conf'}
{include file='header.tpl'}
{insert file='banner_ads.tpl' title='Smarty is cool'}
{if $logged_in}
Welcome, {$name}!
{else}
hi, {$name}
{/if}
{include file='footer.tpl' ad=$random_id}

Smarty: Variables

{$foo} <-- displaying a simple variable (non array/object)
{$foo[4]} <-- display the 5th element of a zero-indexed array
{$foo.bar} <-- display the "bar" key value of an array, similar to PHP $foo['bar']
{$foo.$bar} <-- display variable key value of an array, similar to PHP $foo[$bar]
{$foo->bar} <-- display the object property "bar"
{$foo->bar()} <-- display the return value of object method "bar"
{#foo#} <-- display the config file variable "foo"
{$smarty.config.foo} <-- synonym for {#foo#}
{$foo[bar]} <-- syntax only valid in a section loop, see {section}
{assign var=foo value='baa'}{$foo} <-- displays "baa", see {assign}
Many other combinations are allowed
{$foo.bar.baz}
{$foo.$bar.$baz}
{$foo[4].baz}
{$foo[4].$baz}
{$foo.bar.baz[4]}
{$foo->bar($baz,2,$bar)} <-- passing parameters
{"foo"} <-- static values are allowed
{* display the server variable "SERVER_NAME" ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'])*}