The Blog of Steven Scharf

PHP Form Generator Plugin

Over the past few days I have built a form generator that is built to allow an administrator to build forms with validation using a user friendly administation system.
This Form Generator will build HTML4 and 5 form (optional) and comes with email validation and google recaptcha. It also will validate any field you want and will come with many more validation options other then email checking.

If you want to check it out and read more about it, click here.

Search Engine Update #2

I decided to put some more work into my search engine. I just updated it after brutalizing it for awhile. I have redone how it searches the database of information I crawl. I also made several additions and preparations for future additions. I am trying to make it as relevant as possible while giving the user many options to filter with.

Also for people administrating it if this ever gets used by anyone else but me, I plan to allow many custom options all related to mining data in a way that suites your specific needs.

I have a version page up feel free to check it out and contact me for more information and/or suggestions...

Search Engine Update #1

Much was done this weekend to enhance the crawler, better porter stemming, indexing different file types allowing for image searches, pdf searches and more (coming soon) and it also will now find links and index them as well. It will now also index dynamic pages to give better results instead of sending users to gateway pages (like the blog index).

On the search engine side I added many options like phrase searches, go to first result, search all words seperated by a space or by a plus sign, exclude words preceded by the minus sign and due to better porter stemming algorithm's employed, better "What did you mean?" results.

So far I like the results, but I have much more to do. Adding categorical searching is next on the list followed by showing more statistics about results which will coincide with the category build giving results for each category...

New Search Engine in Beta

Today I launched a new toy. My PHP/MySQL Search Engine.
It's very basic right now but has a lot of potential. This was created from scratch. I also built a crawler for this CMS and it will crawl the entire site and index site content and meta-data. So far I have to work on relevancy a bit, MySQL does a great job on its own but I need to tweak it on the PHP side both with the Crawler and Search Engine.

I collect keywords and links so far and have removed JavaScript and other useless code. I have some Stop Words that I avoid when you search and have a "Did you mean?" feature available and also gives more then one word with a link to the search query of course...

Major User/Group Permissions System Update & More!

Many update's have been applied recently to this CMS. Most noteably is the Permission System. Many system's out there employ granular control over their permissions allowing Administrator's to create varying groups with whatever access they like.
My system employs much the same tactic with the added flavour that you can also give user's specific permissions which override the group permissions a user might have. Defaulting back to the group permissions is a click of a button.
The permissions you can give relates to each function within the administration area. Maybe you want to allow someone to add news, but not edit or delete? Maybe you want another Administrator but with one role while another group of Administrators fullfill another?
It's all simply achieved with checkboxes and the system allows for scalability quite easily using standard database methods and programming techniques...