MyPlaza Documentation
Thankyou for downloading this package, and opening up this readme file! I have countless hours, writing over 15,000 lines of code, for this (reasonably large) project, and I hope that you enjoy the end result of it!
- ZiNgA BuRgA
Please see the MyPlaza Website for more detailed guides and updates.
What is MyPlaza?
Simply put, MyPlaza is a powerful MyBB plugin, adding a money/shop system to your MyBB boards.
MyPlaza is a very complex MyBB plugin (if not THE most complex MyBB plugin), with a plethora of features. Here's a "quick" summary:
- Powerful shop system with many features - just to name some:
- Obviously, the ability to change the cost of items, including global rates for them, and the ability to set different premium rates for each usergroup.
- Ability to set a stock limit for items.
- Ability to define restocking amounts and periods for items.
- Ability to set purchase limits for items, including time periods.
- Ability to set icons for each of your items and categories to help give them a special touch :P.
- Ability to set and define custom formatting for each of your categories and items.
- Ability to set usergroup permissions on different categories, and hide certain items - plenty of flexibility in controlling permissions.
- Ability to hide individual items from the stats page.
- Number of purchases made by a user, and for items are recorded.
- Full logging of all purchases.
- Fully customize your money system - from options, such as the name of the currency, to the number of decimal places used.
- Includes a stats page, and a user purchase history page, in addition to the plaza.
- Extensible through modules - The MyPlaza framework is an excellent platform on which modules can be built upon. This, being one of the key features of MyPlaza is a large discussion topic on its own. See modules for more information.
- Enhnaced by JavaScript and AJAX - Allowing many actions to be performed without requiring full page loads. This reduces server load, reduces bandwidth consumption & loading times, and looks much nicer. Users with Javascript disabled are also catered for.
- Automatic Code Editing - ...is a powerful system which allows MyPlaza to deliver many features, such as automatic updating and fully automated module installation. Modified files are also automatically backed up for your peace of mind.
- Powerful administration options - Mass move/handle items, log viewing and deleting, setting users' money plus a mass money reset features... there's too much to mention.
- MyBB Integration - MyPlaza was designed to be integrated with MyBB (and MyBB alone). The integration is "seamless", using MyBB's theme, language and plugin systems and taking advantage of the many features offered by MyBB.
- Easy to manage - With most actions performable on one page, quick links sprinkled around the AdminCP and a streamlined interface, administering MyPlaza is easy.
- Secure - all queries pass to the database are escaped and permissions and post_codes are checked for all actions. This ensures your board is safe from attacks such as CSRF or request forging.
- Speed - MyPlaza employs many optimization techniques to ensure your board is not bogged down by slow code. With many optimized queries, use of dynamic code loading, caching and the use of shutdown multi-query optimized functions, you can be sure that MyPlaza will have a minimal effect on your server performance.
- Organization - A large focus has been placed on making MyPlaza very user friendly - to users and admins alike. The front-end is easy to understand and navigate. The AdminCP has been designed with minimal clutter in the CP menu, and large amounts of settings are grouped.
- Easy Installation - MyPlaza requires no code modifications to be performed, meaning that you just simply upload and activate. Many checks are performed to ensure that it's a painless process.
- Innovative - MyPlaza has many innovative features not seen in any other MyBB plugin, making MyPlaza very unique.
- Many other features - Attention to detail was a key thought during the development phase, and many undocumented features are present to make MyPlaza just that every bit better.
Objective
Like basically all my projects, I do these out of interest sake. But also, because MyBB is an excellent forum system, however, lacking any sort of shop plugin, which many other more well known forum systems have. So I decided to make one for MyBB. Rather than just make another shop system, the aim of MyPlaza is to create a better shop system than available on any other forum software. For example, to date, I have not yet seen another shop system which makes use of AJAX.
As for money systems, the ones available to MyBB are very basic at best, and usually full of flawed code. So rather than fix other peoples' code, I wrote my own. :)
Not good enough?
Found a bug or have a wonderful idea? Feel free to submit your bug reports and ideas at the MyPlaza Release Thread!
Incomplete Version Note
Note that this is an incomplete version of MyPlaza. Some features may not fully be implemented, and some may be changed in the upcomming releases.
License
MyPlaza is licensed under the GPL.
Next Links
Credits
Many thanks to the MyBB Group for providing an excellent forum software. Also, some code in MyPlaza is copied from MyBB.
Also, since I am absolutely hopeless at graphics and design :P I have "stole" some icons from random sources. Unfortunately, I can't find who to credit for some of these, but I do know some of the icons were from RefreshCL Icon Pack by TPDK (www.tpdkdesign.net) - props to him! :)
Finally, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all those people at MyBB Community for supporting me. Without you guys, I simply would've dropped this out of boredom :P Thanks to: hibbyware, Pirata Nervo, Animal24, DonNemesis, fardly83, FirefoxWiz, Jag100, jcay, leealex, pachel and Soshite
Version History
v0.51 (Beta) - January, 20, 2008
- A few additional speedups/optimizations put in place.
v0.5 (Beta) - January, 19, 2008
- Some bugs fixed.
- Added Attachment Fees module v1.1.1.
- Updated Income module to v1.2.5.
- Many optimizations added.
- Now XHTML/CSS2 valid (note, the upgrade script will not fix up XHTML issues in previous versions - if you don't have any modules activated, you can reconstruct the templates (AdminCP -> MyPlaza -> Maintanence), or you can reactivate MyPlaza (you can backup things if necessary))
v0.43 (Preview version 10) - December, 30, 2007
- Few bugs and issues found in v0.42 fixed.
- Added a "soft replace" mode to the template handling system. Soft replace doesn't replace any templates during installation. Instead, it replaces templates at run-time. This helps with all sorts of template issues, at the cost of some speed. See template handling for more info.
- Added ability to backup/restore MyPlaza related data, under the Maintenance section of the AdminCP.
- Updated Income module to v1.2.4.
- Updated User Formatting module to v1.0.5.
v0.42 (Preview version 9) - December, 25, 2007
- Few bugs found in v0.41 fixed.
v0.41 (Preview version 8) - December, 23, 2007
v0.4 (Preview version 7) - December, 12, 2007
Close to a beta version!
- Added two new security features for Advanced Modules - you can restrict access to only Super Admins, and to certain IPs. This should make you feel it a little safer to leave Advanced Modules on all the time.
- Minor bug fixes and changes, including ability to change the 'money' field to help reduce conflicts with other MyBB plugins which use that field (note, you'll need to edit the define() to do this, and if you already have MyPlaza activated, you'll have to change the name of the column in the DB)
- Implemented some dirty-ish methods to allow MyPlaza to work fully without the optional code edits.
- Updated Income module to v1.2.2.
- Updated Inventory module to v1.0.3.
- Updated Bank module to v1.0.6.
- Most other modules updated to be compatible with v0.4
- Added Custom name/title/post formatting module, v1.0.3.
v0.32 (Preview version 6) - December, 6, 2007
- Stability and bug fixes, and optmizations.
- Most modules updated to incorporate these improvements.
- Added ability to view the contents of backed up files (Advanced Modules) from the AdminCP.
- Added an update check feature.
v0.31 (Preview version 5) - December, 4, 2007
v0.3 (Preview version 4) - December, 3, 2007
- Fixed quite a few bugs in the v0.2 release.
- Made a few changes to the AdminCP back-end - allowing greater flexibility with modules.
- You can now set premiums on item costs for usergroups. Note that this requires extra code editos to work (these are optional).
- Updated Income module to v1.1.0
- Updated Bank module to v1.0.3
- Added Inventory module v1.0.1 (updated to take advantages of MyPlaza v0.3)
v0.2 (Preview version 3) - November, 27, 2007
- Fixed some bugs in the previous release.
- Changed how items are handled in the AdminCP a fair bit - should be much easier to use now. Also removed the *bad* item section.
- Quite a few changes to how things work behind the scenes, allowing modules to do more in the AdminCP.
- Some other minor changes, including a bugfix update to the bank module.
v0.11 (Preview version 2) - November, 25, 2007
- Added two new plugin hooks to allow modules to hook into the hoptolinks in the AdminCP.
- Fixed a few minor bugs.
- Updated Bank module to v1.0.1
- Added a "fix" to allow modules to upload files via AJAX.
v0.1 (Preview version) - November, 24, 2007