/Tutorials/ Create your own dating site (Part 3)

07/07/2006 | Filed under Develop > Tutorials

Click here to read Part 1 of this tutorial

Click here to read Part 2 of this tutorial

TUTORIAL 4: Managing users:

Step 1: Users are the lifeblood of any social networking site. The more users signed up to use your service, the more successful you are. It also becomes more difficult to manage the site, too. More users means an increased strain on your server and database. On dating sites you also have the perennial problem of bogus users.	Step 2: PHPizabi provides you with tools to prune back and manage user accounts. Look in the Users section of the PHPizabi Administration Panel and select Manage User Types. This enables you to assign labels to users that will control their privileges throughout the site. The default is premium for paid-up subscribers.	Step 3: In the Users Access Control section, you can allow or deny your users access to parts of your site based on the user types you were able to configure in the previous section. For example, you may choose to block ordinary users from using forums and mailing other members, reserving that for premium members.
Step 4: In the next section, Users Types/Payments Management, you can configure your payment system. Here you can define how much the fees for using the advanced features of the site are. By default, the fee structure applies to premium members, but additional member types you add will also appear here.	Step 5: The registered users control section enables you to keep an eye on your customers. You can see who’s online and what they’re up to. Users can be manually assigned different membership status in this area. Scroll down a little further in the main Administration Panel and you can use the Ban Control to exclude users by IP address.	Step 6: We’ve concentrated on configuring PHPizabi, and we suggest you spend some more time exploring the interface before daring to go live with any web site using the script. When you do eventually go live, you’ll want to customise the look and feel of the software. Though this is possible, it’s not that simple.
Step 7: The easiest and quickest way to put your own stamp on your site is to return to the General System Configurations section and find the upload box labelled Site Logo. This enables you to replace the default site logo with your own to create your own site identity. This should be a GIF image of 324x84 pixels.	Step 8: To make more drastic changes, you’ll have to create your own new theme. FTP to your web space and find the folder /phpizabi/ theme/. Create a new folder and name it something like ‘mytheme’, then upload the contents of /phpizabi/theme/default/ to the new folder from your local machine.	Step 9: To make this theme active, go to the admin panel and choose ‘mytheme’ from the Default Theme drop-down in General System Configurations. You can now tweak the files in the mytheme folder as much as you like. We suggest editing the CSS files and replacing pictures in the images folder for relatively easy customisation.

Comments

Godwin Adamah / 14/10/2006 / 16:31

wanted to creat a dating website with al the facilities

niko / 22/12/2006 / 15:23

oki i want creat dating site

Scott / 03/03/2007 / 23:41

Im not that great at IT or creating, but I want to build a website with members and chat facility, any one, know any companies or person who could build this for me? email me pls

Daniel / 15/03/2007 / 04:04

Hi Scott,
I am a freelance and charges very minimal on creating such portal with Mambo Community Builder or PHPizabi. Do drop me an email at daniel.ho@gmail.com

Thanks
Daniel

Claude Gelinas / 15/05/2007 / 04:12 / http://blog.logixca.com/

Thanks for the fine tutorial ; )

PHPizabi will quickly enable any monkey with a PHP / MySQL hosting account to setup a "social networking" web destination.

Once that's done, the hardest part is, as you aptly point it, to muster any level of interest.

If you happen to own a memorable domain name people type in all the time, this will help tremendously as it will add much needed legitimacy to your offering.

I'm still not sure if PHPizabi is the right way to go to create a world class community though. I'd love to see major web sites operating this technology. It's a nice coding effort, nonetheless.

Chris / 24/08/2008 / 02:56 / http://www.imingle.ca

Thanks for the great post. I have to truly look at the site that I have and see if this is a better option than what I have installed. Looks very slick.

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