So I sit here tonight wondering to myself “What does it take to run IndexU?” and the answers are not as simple as you think.
First I had to ask myself what IndexU was. The answer, in simplest terms, is a script. And what does a script do? A script takes user input and makes a specific output. That’s it. It’s as simple as that.
Garbage in, garbage out (G.I.G.O.), but if you put quality content in, you get a quality site in return. So why is that?
I decided to go look at competitors and other scripts. So I looked at CMS’s (Content Management Systems), directory scripts, forums, blogs, arcade scripts, proxy scripts and a few that perhaps cannot even be categorized easily. All of these scripts use PHP as their programming language, they all use HTML as their markup language and almost all of them use MySQL as their database. Some of them use SMARTY for their templates. Don’t worry about these names and terms for now, we’ll get to it later with simple explanations.
And what did I find? I found that no matter what script a user uses, it’s either a nice result or it’s G.I.G.O.. It really doesn’t matter where you’re coming from, where you’re going or what you want to do. If you expect a script to make you an overnight millionaire you’re dreaming and you might as well turn off your computer and get a job delivering newspapers for the extra money you’re looking for.
So this isn’t an IndexU “thing”. But some people say it is. Quick, tell me the last time you got a job and within 5 minutes knew everything there was about that job and no one else could do it better. You can’t, because it will never happen.
That’s the same thing with a script on your website.
Now of course I’m going to talk about IndexU here, because that’s what we deal with. But this applies to almost any script type website you might want to give a shot at running.
So first there’s installation. Sure you can pay us and we can do it, so that’s dealt with.
Next up is configuration. If you read the manual, ask a few questions and read a bit on the forums you can figure out most things. It’s not too hard to set up.
Next would be the theme, and this could include the whole theme or just customization of the theme. This is going to require knowledge of HTML, or a GOOD HTML editor that will not munge (break) PHP and SMARTY code when it edits files. HTML is a markup language, meaning that it is a language that gives instructions on how to interpret text. How do I do HTML? I write it out in notepad because I know it, I learned HTML many many years ago, way back when Windows 95 was in it’s infancy.
But you, you’re going to have to learn how to edit it, change it, delete it, move it and hack it if you want to make your site “unique”. Sure you can pay someone to do it, but a custom theme can easily cost upwards of $1000 by a good designer, and $500 is a decent price by someone who knows what they’re doing.
What about PHP, will you need to learn it? Not really, but once you get a good understanding of how HTML works you should then be able to figure out how PHP is broken up into sections and perhaps be able to pick out some small functions that are just common sense. PHP is a programming language, meaning that it is a language that interacts with a computer to perform a function.
What about SMARTY, will you need to learn it? Again not really, most of the things in IndexU will never require you to alter any smarty code at all. And if there is a call for it, most users on the forum will be able to help you as it’s usually just a very small change. SMARTY is a web template system.
What about SQL, will you need to learn that? Most likely not at all. SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is a language for databases. IndexU takes care of connecting to the database and adding/changing/deleting database records.
Lets run down what I’ve said already.
1) With almost every script you use, if you put garbage in, you’re get garbage out
2) All scripts use some kind of language, and sometimes more than one
3) Of all those languages, if you want to modify the script you will at least need to know HTML
4) There’s a lot of “stuff” in your script that you don’t need to know or worry about
So what about templates? If you don’t know HTML or any other “language”, how can you modify a template to get a unique looking website by doing it yourself? Well you could buy a template from one of the sites that sell templates for IndexU. That doesn’t exactly get you a unique site, but it seperates you from the sites that all use the free templates.
This is actually a good step for a lot of reasons.
1) No HTML or programming knowledge required
2) A limited amount of users will use the same template
3) With so many sites on the web, the odds of someone seeing two sites with the same theme are slim
So you decide to purchase a theme and with help from the manual you upload and start using that theme. Eventually you will find that you want to modify the theme. Now with IndexU Deluxe’s plugins that is getting a heck of a lot easier to do, but there are still some things that you cannot do unless you know HTML.
So now is the time to pick up a book, or search the web for some tutorials on HTML because lets face it, if you’re serious about your website you are going to want to customize it. You need to learn HTML, it’s not really that difficult, and there are tons of resources on the web that are free to help you in this regard.
