The Young Writers Knowledge Base has not been getting much attention, which I attribute to a number of issues. Namely, it was riddled with errors, it was a bit out of the way, and it was not seamless with the rest of the forum.
So starting last night and just finishing up an hour ago, I fixed all those issues (for a detailed explanation on how, see below). The number one thing you will notice is that it has been renamed to "Writing Tips." You should also not get any errors now, and when you post an article, it will show up in the "View new posts since last visit" search. Additionally, other people can now comment on the articles, and the article body itself has been reworked to make it look more attractive.
Detailed Explanation on Coding:
Firstly, unlike the last knowledge base program, this one is really a pseudo-knowledge base in that it co-exists with the forum, which in my view is far more preferable. It also uses the exact same code as the topic and forum pages. What is different is the layout, which was done by just messing around with html.
To redirect all the pages to the correct layouts, I had the make duplicates of the "forum" and "topic" files, which I did by changing "viewforum.php" to "viewarticles.php" and "viewtopic.php" to "viewarticlesbody.php."
The next step was redirecting from the search results so it took you to the correct layout. This was done by adding rough bits of code into search.php. For the topic links (as an example), there were two different options. One takes the user to the normal topic layout, the other takes the user to the article layout. The program knows which one to choose as the options are based on what forums the topic itself resides in.
The third and hardest part to figure out was redirecting when posting. To do this, I eventually found out I could just add a duplicate copy of "posting.php," and call it "article_posting.php."
Of course, in all the files I made, I had to change the proper links inside. For instance, in "article_posting.php," you have to change all "viewtopic.$phpex" to "viewarticlebody.$phpex."
That's the short and simple version of what I did, and it works wonderfully now!
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