BellaBook

BellaBook is a small and simple PHP guestbook. It works using “flat files” — that means no need to fiddle with complex MySQL databases!

BellaBook has been crafted to provide a feature packed user feedback system with an easy-to-edit coding structure; using CSS to control it all.

You should probably start with the installation instructions below, or if you’re still not convinced skip to the feature list.

Installing BellaBook

First things first, you’ll want to download the script:

DOWNLOAD BELLABOOK

Once the script has downloaded — it shouldn’t take long — extract the files using the built in Windows zip tool, WinZip, or your favourite archiving software. After extraction, you’ll want to rename the folder to something like “guestbook”, “gb” or “book” as this will be part of your guestbook URL.

Open prefs.php and customise the options carefully. The options you choose must remain inside the quotation marks. E.g. if you want your username to be jimbo, you’d change $admin_name = "admin"; to: $admin_name = "jimbo";

When you’re all done, upload the whole lot to your website using your normal FTP client. You now need to use the chmod command to change the permission of the “.txt” files to 666 (or owner: read, write; group: read, write; world: read, write). If you get stuck, Google should be able to help you out.

That’s it! Go play with your new guestbook.

BellaBook Features

Spam word and IP checks/blocking
Known spam-bot blocking
Basic flood control
Optional required fields
Built-in theme ’switcher’
“Space out” big words to retain layout shape
Optional entry moderation feature
Pagination as standard — in admin panel as well
Optional emoticons included
Optional spam-preventing captcha
CSS based layout, tables for entry display & valid XHTML pages
Line breaks in entries
New: inline sanitisation
New: hidden field spambot ‘trap’

Convinced? Why not jump back to the download link and instructions.

Plugins/etc

There are currently two plugins - Akismet integration courtesy of Amelie. Please choose the correct download for your version of BellaBook (can be found in the script readme.txt)

Download: BellaBook3.5 Akismet plugin — a version of the popular spam-protection plugin especially modified for BellaBook. Plugin integration credit goes to Amelie of Not-Noticeably.Net.

Download: BellaBook3.6 AND 3.7 Akismet plugin — a version of the popular spam-protection plugin especially modified for BellaBook. Plugin integration credit goes to Amelie of Not-Noticeably.Net.

Free BellaBook Themes

If you’re too lazy to customise BellaBook yourself (aren’t we all?) there’s free themes in a variety of colours and sizes to give your PHP guestbook a fresh look.

Blue Wave

Included in downloadable zip are the background image and stylesheet files. Upload to you BellaBook directly, and change your stylesheet preference in prefs.php to “bluewave”

DOWNLOAD

Page created: April 8, 2008
Page last modified: September 23, 2008

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