Sendcard Admin Area and Plugins
In the last tutorial, we installed Sendcard on our local PC for testing and development. But we still have some free plugins to consider. They are available through the Admin area. Paste the following url into your web browser to open the Admin area and then click on the Plugins link in the left menu.
https://localhost/sendcard/admin/index.php
The Back Button plugin will add a Back button to the form used when sending an ecard. This is the only option I choose to add to the basic installation. There are other options. The Mailing List option adds a mailing list to the site. The Send to Friend plugin adds a link to the ecard display page allowing the recipient to send the ecard to a friend. Most sites have these features. However, this will become a Facebook app and therefore, we will not include these plugins.
I have to admit that I was surprised that the Admin panel did not include a form for installing images or swfs into the system. This is done manually by adding each card into the index.php code. Here's a look at the default front page for the ecard site. As you can see, it comes with a few ecard images installed.
If you have a lot of ecards, you will need to duplicate the index.php file to create category pages. For example, in the Facebook app we will have only a sample of the ecards that are on my client's website. We will use only two category pages. One page will list the general ecards such as a thank you or an invitation ecard. The other category page will list holiday ecards for the most popular holidays. The index.php page will have a small menu leading to these category pages. Because I didn't want the home page of the Facebook app to be just a menu, I decided to use the general category page as the home page (index.php) for the site. The holiday category page was named holiday.php.
This manual setup would work fine for a small ecard system. Adding and removing ecards manually from the category pages would be acceptable and not too time consuming. However, for my client we needed a more automated system for updating the ecards so I created an Admin area for this. However, that is beyond the scope of this tutorial. So, for the development process, we will be manually adding the ecards to the system.
Sendcard Copyright by Peter Bowyer and licensed under the GPL-compatible Artistic License.
https://localhost/sendcard/admin/index.php
The Back Button plugin will add a Back button to the form used when sending an ecard. This is the only option I choose to add to the basic installation. There are other options. The Mailing List option adds a mailing list to the site. The Send to Friend plugin adds a link to the ecard display page allowing the recipient to send the ecard to a friend. Most sites have these features. However, this will become a Facebook app and therefore, we will not include these plugins.
I have to admit that I was surprised that the Admin panel did not include a form for installing images or swfs into the system. This is done manually by adding each card into the index.php code. Here's a look at the default front page for the ecard site. As you can see, it comes with a few ecard images installed.
If you have a lot of ecards, you will need to duplicate the index.php file to create category pages. For example, in the Facebook app we will have only a sample of the ecards that are on my client's website. We will use only two category pages. One page will list the general ecards such as a thank you or an invitation ecard. The other category page will list holiday ecards for the most popular holidays. The index.php page will have a small menu leading to these category pages. Because I didn't want the home page of the Facebook app to be just a menu, I decided to use the general category page as the home page (index.php) for the site. The holiday category page was named holiday.php.
This manual setup would work fine for a small ecard system. Adding and removing ecards manually from the category pages would be acceptable and not too time consuming. However, for my client we needed a more automated system for updating the ecards so I created an Admin area for this. However, that is beyond the scope of this tutorial. So, for the development process, we will be manually adding the ecards to the system.
Sendcard Copyright by Peter Bowyer and licensed under the GPL-compatible Artistic License.
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