Totally new to your site - GT Question

Worker Joined: Feb 16, 2004 Posts: 164

Hey,

I see your webpages have html tags, but you do not seem to use google tap; what have you used to generate these tags? Why dont you use google tap?

Richard

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

??? I use GT. Do you mean META tags? Confused

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:39 am

Oh you do use GT, oh - sorry I was just wondering if there was an alternative. Do you know of a guide to using GT? - Ill check nukecops now.

Richard.

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:43 am

Not everything is GT'd. Be aware that on an active site, without a very powerful server, GT will bring your server to its knees.

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 11:38 am

Yeh i know - thats what im worried about - sigh

Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 11:40 pm

I'm really hoping that someday soon, there will be a way to achieve the abilities of having GT, without having to use mod_rewrite.

This whole process is anything but affective. The bigger your site is, the more brutal enabling GT is on your resources.

Apache documentation describes mod_rewrite best:

Quote:

``The great thing about mod_rewrite is it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail. The downside to mod_rewrite is that it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail.''
-- Brian Behlendorf
Apache Group

`` Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo. d***ed cool voodoo, but still voodoo. ''
-- Brian Moore
bem@news.cmc.net

Never a decent perl or javascript around to do this when you need it! At least something that just READS/interprets data versus re-writing it!

Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 11:47 pm

- I never read that. That is so painfully hilarious!

Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 11:52 pm

For those that would like some documentation on Google Tap, I found this to be EXTREMELY helpful!

http://67.15.16.43/phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=PHP-Nuke_HOWTO&page=googletap.html

This is probably the first real useful information that speaks directly to the following issues:

1) What you need to know before implementing GT
2) What version to run and where to get it (according to phpnuke.org)
3) What to check before installing it
4) How to check server utilization before installing it
5) How to make sure that your server can even run it
6) Apache mod_rewrite information that goes a VERY long way in answering many questions about utilization, exposure & security.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
7) The following statement had a fairly large impact on me, especially as it was the first time that I have read anything like it.

Quote:

"The second consideration is one of security. You are permitting users to modify server configuration, which may result in changes over which you have no control. Carefully consider whether you want to give your users this privilege."

8) How to install Google Tap
9) A detailed explanation of how it all works including lines of code and corresponding explanations.

You'll find the quotes in the Apache link! :)

Unfortunately, after reading all of this, I decided to disable mod_rewrite in my server and say "To hell with this idea". The security and utilization issues were just too scary. Since disabling mod_rewrite, and reloading my pre-GT configuration, my server's utilization has gone from the terrible 88% to the fantastic top load of 11%. Average page load time has dropped by 74-90% making my site CONSIDERABLY faster.

So much for that idea. Someone tell me when a solution comes out that doesn't kill me in the process of (for the sake of) getting me listed.

Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 3:49 am

Question: How does Google Tap handle a navigation bar written in Javascript?

Question: I seem to remember that when installing, you have to go through all the nuke files changing the urls from & to & - pain in the arse - My question is could i use dreamweaver Ctrl F find and replace ALL function - but for the whole www directory? Then manually go in and change the none working urls from a prior backup?

Question: I have many NONE STANDARD - not written for - modules and blocks that i want to adapt for Google Tap to work - including a alternate downloads module but i am unsure of the right code to enter in the header regarding the new additions Help!

Questions: Are there any other alterations that need to be made within these new modules / blocks to make them compatable?

Question: Is it all worth it? - From your previous post I am uncertain, is that your private server 64bitguy? Dedicated? Virtual?

Richard Shocked

Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 9:30 am

My BETA site is on a dedicated development server.

My public site is on a shared host.

Is it all worth it? I think you need to measure that for yourself. For me, I found it not to be worth it on several levels. My primary concerns revolved around server performance, security, the impacts on future releases or integration of ANYTHING (including how doing this would affect me in terms of 404 errors from search engines if I ever changed solutions) and finally the amount of work that had to be done to enable the GT solution throughout my entire site and then to maintain it.

In the case of my development server, the impacts were substantial in terms of performance and overall stability which convinced me to finally stay away from it. My fear is that if the utilization for one site almost caps out a dedicated server, how will implimenting this on my shared hosting impact not only my performance, but everyone else's? Also, will that mean that 10 hours after enabling it, I'll find my domain out on the street when my host tells me to "Piss off"?

Next, I really didn't care for the fact that SO much is excluded from the standard GT solution. When I say standard, I mean NextGEn, as there about 5 different versions of this thing. I am by no means a PHP expert, so having a product with no documentation and no comment lines in the scripts was a fairly large turn off, especially a product that only enables about 20% of my site by standard design. The rest had to be done by manually reprogramming GT and my module/block components.

Prior to discovering the links I mention above, I spent 2 weeks reading HUNDREDS of discussion threads about GT, NONE that had any decent explanations or documentation. I found many questions, but nothing in terms of substantiated fact until finding the above links (on my own, only yesterday when phpnuke.org enabled their new server).

When I asked questions in forums specializing in GT, most that replied were still really new with it and didn't REALLY understand the impacts of using it; though many would like to think that they did.

In my investigations of THEIR sites, I found many problems, missed sections and overall, that sites using GT:
a) Were too small to even justify using GT. (50 pages or less)
b) Had little or no DYNAMIC content enabled. (Many of these folks like to call static content, dynamic content... 10 pictures from last years' vacation can hardly be called dynamic content, but your 20 pages of news script in the javascript scrolling window IS dynamic but not enabled!)
c) Had existing GT bugs that they were unaware of (Had sid's in their forums that were suposedly enabled with GT, etc...)
I could go on, but again, it's not a really productive line of discussion, so I won't.

One thread where I asked questions just got real ugly (as I got "prodded" and "probed" by someone not even using it, but considered himself an expert and thought that I should spend more time justifying my questions rather than asking them) I don't even like thinking about it, as this is the first example of me actually clicking the ignore button in Nuke, but I'll leave that completely alone.

As for your non-standard modules/blocks. You're on your own. That's pretty much the case with GT in general anyway but what you will find is that the NextGEn solution covers MUCH more in terms of add-ins. The difficulty is in the modifications of the code to enable proper restructuring of the entire site.

I'm sure you can get everything in GT, but at what cost time wise? At what cost PERFORMANCE wise? And, if you suck utilization, how long before your host cuts you off? Do I think that some of your modifications will mean DOWN TIME when you actually load GT?

My answers are: A long time, High performance cost, who knows, and probably outages, but I couldn't give you an honest answer that would be FACTUAL, nor can anyone else, regardless of what they might "say" here or elsewhere.

I also couldn't tell you how future updates to GT, your mods, or PHP itself will affect ANY of that work once it is finally done.

I CAN say this:
1) BACKUP EVERYTHING (and I mean EVERYTHING) before you start!
2) Don't count on getting a lot of quick support. This is Open Source and really new stuff. I suggest testing on a server that is not production as your outages could last for days before you figure out a solution to any particular problem. This happened to me on my BETA server. I found a problem, then it took 20 different "solutions" to actually fix that one problem. Then I would find ANOTHER problem... etc...

I do know that there must be a better way. Even the Apache support people think so. It's just a matter of time before someone (smarter at PHP programming than I am) figures it out. Again, I'm thinking 1 of 3 things.

1) Site interpreter (constantly reads the entire PHP site structure, converts every source page to html and replicates the entire site in a parallel sub-domain or other production environment)
2) perl converter (does essentially the same thing that GT does, only it uses perl scripts (or anything else that is not so CPU utilization intensive) instead of Apache rewrite commands.
3) A version of phpBB and PHP-Nuke that runs on the backend as PHP script, but OUTPUTS pages BY DESIGN as .html (Can you imagine?)

Some examples of sites that are using it well are, ravenphpscripts.com, phpnuke.org and nukeresources.com. How did they each set it all up, I have no idea, they keep somewhat quiet about that and about how it has affected their individual resources... but keep this in mind; WHAT VERSION OF PHP-NUKE are they using? 99% are NOT using 7.0 or 7.1 from what I can see. The older versions (6.5 through 6.9) seem to really like GT much better than the latest releases. Everyone has mods too, but these sites seem fairly standardized in what they offer. The Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) method seems to work best here. When you start to add things like mp3 Music blocks, 3rd party photo-albums, radio blocks, video training blocks, 3rd party news importers and other custom features, GT looks more and more like a burden and less and less like a solution.

Just my 2 cents....take it with a grain of salt.

Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 11:39 am

I'm in-between stops but I just wanted to comment on one thing and I will comment more later Smile

64bitguy wrote:

Some examples of sites that are using it well are, ravenphpscripts.com, phpnuke.org and nukeresources.com. How did they each set it all up, I have no idea, they keep somewhat quiet about that and about how it has affected their individual resources

Seriously, I have never kept quiet about GT. I have customized it as everyone has to do who uses it. If I could do it over again I would NEVER have done it at all. Reason being, I didn't know what I didn't know. Fact: You can never completely go back, short of a whole lot of manual changes to every link mentioned anywhere in your site that is a GT link. To stop using it is simple, in scope. You pull all the PHP code out but the .htaccess code must always remain, unless like I said, you go in manually and change all references that have been GT'd. More later ...