Excuse me while I “squee!” in geekish glee/delight.

One problem in eFiction is that the display order for the categories occasionally gets messed up. I gave up trying to fix them by hand a long time ago and just had Jasson give me a cheap and dirty work-around.

Well, tonight I came up with a solution all on my own. Sorry, this gets pretty geeky from here on out.

I made a query to the database, asking for all the subcategories in alphabetical order. I then created a while loop that took those 337 results and wrote SQL update statements for me. I offset the count by 9, since I don’t want to reorder the main categories since they’re okay right as they are.

And boom! 337, neat little MySQL update statements that reordered the categories for me. ^_^

There are times where I look at all the designs other people are doing and feel decidely inferior. This just suddenly made me realize just how far I’ve come and how much I’ve learned.

And it feels very good. ♥

Description: This is a guide to creating your own modifications to the user page. This includes discussions of PHP, MySQL, and other things you will need to know in order to modify your user page.

Requirements: eFiction 2.0

This guide is also written as though you currently have user.php, viewuser.php, and your database open as you’re reading.

Mod History:
29 June 2006 — Created this guide and submitted to developers for review
09 July 2006 — Guide Released
14 July 2006 — Edited for clarity

Download HTML version

Modification & Support: eFiction.org

Table of Contents

• Page 1: Introduction & Requirements
• Page 2: Understanding your Database Structure
• Page 3: Planning your Database Addition
• Page 4: Inserting your new field
• Page 5: Introduction to user.php
• Page 6: Understanding SQL statements
• Page 7: The Edit Bio Form

INTRODUCTION

So you want to create a custom user page? Great! Customizations to the user page are probably one of the areas that receive the most modification requests for eFiction 2.0. While this page may look confusing, it’s actually pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it.

As with any mod, making frequent backups is essential. If you want to be really safe, I suggest making multiple copies of your modifications as you progress through each step, for an easy return to that step should something go wrong.

Another thing to note is that eFiction 3.0 will allow you to add your own custom fields to the user profile. I’ll update this guide or release a new one once it is released to explain how to customize your install and how to do further modifications.