jemjabella - ultimately better than you

BellaBuzz

BellaBuzz is a small and simple PHP “ask & answer” script that allows visitors to ask questions without having to directly contact the webmaster. It works using “flat files” — that means no need to fiddle with complex MySQL databases!

BellaBuzz is very small and very easy to integrate into any site, including WordPress. It is intended as a secure replacement for other less secure scripts such as Wak’s Ask & Answer; it is not a fully featured FAQ/knowledgebase system. A suitable alternative to fill greater needs can be found in PHPAskIt

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

Installing BellaBuzz

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

DOWNLOAD BELLABUZZ

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 can rename the folder to something like “ask”, “qa” or “faq” as this will be part of your script 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 ask & answer script.

DOWNLOAD BELLABUZZ

BellaBuzz v1 Features

  • Security/protection on ask box to prevent spam bots
  • Stripping of HTML and pointless special chars for security
  • Ability to block URLs in questions to help prevent spam
  • Admin panel to easily answer/delete questions

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

BellaBuzz Tutorials/Plugins

Modifications and tips for personalising BellaBuzz:

Page created: April 8, 2008
Page last modified: April 20, 2008