Advanced Guestbook Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use the Advanced Guestbook guestbook software with your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET specializes in hosting Advanced Guestbook software and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your site with our web hosting service.

Advanced Guestbook is open source, meaning that you can use and distribute it as you'd like as long as you don't change it.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and are setting up Advanced Guestbook at http://johnsmith.com/ag/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for Advanced Guestbook to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'ag' with a user named 'ag'. When you do this SiteWorx will prefix the database and user names with some text resembling your domain name.

   With our example domain of 'johnsmith.com' the database name is 'johnsmit_ag' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_ag'.

2. Download the latest version of Advanced Guestbook from the Advanced Guestbook website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com.

   You should now have a folder on your desktop named 'guestbook'. Rename this folder to 'ag'. Open the 'ag' folder and then the 'admin' folder. Open the Advanced Guestbook 'config.inc.php' file in your text editing program. You need to change the values of the database variables in order for the script to connect to the database for your web hosting account. For this example, we'll change the following information:

   • $GB_DB["dbName"] = "johnsmit_ag";
   • $GB_DB["host"] = "localhost"; - Stays the same.
   • $GB_DB["user"] = "johnsmit_ag";
   • $GB_DB["pass"] = "mypassword";

   Your screen should look like this:

   

   Save and close the Advanced Guestbook 'config.inc.php' file.
3. Upload the 'ag' folder to your web hosting account. You can do this using an FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. Once the Advanced Guestbook files and folders are finished uploading, you need to change the permissions on two of the folders in order for the script to write to them. You can do this using the CHMOD command in your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. CHMOD the 'public' and 'tmp' folders to 777.
4. You can now access the install page. For this example, we'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/ag/install.php'. You should now be on the database settings page. Enter the information for the database you created in step #1. For this example, we'll enter the following information:
   • Database: johnsmit_ag
   • Username: johnsmit_ag
   • Password: mypassword

   Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Create Table' button to continue. Your tables should be created successfully. If you receive any errors, check to make sure you entered the correct information for your database. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Click now' link to continue. You should now be on the Advanced Guestbook admin login page. Enter 'test' for the username and '123' for the password. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Submit' button to continue. You should now be on the main page of the Advanced Guestbook admin control panel. From here you can manage and customize your guestbook how you see fit. Make sure you change the admin account login and password for security purposes. Your screen should look like this:

   

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