Searching for Social Network Script: Part I

I was recently asked to develop a custom script for a private tutoring company. I decided that the requirements would best be suited by first obtaining a social networking engine and then doing some heavy modding. So the first question was: what's the best social networking script out there: a seemingly simple choice. I mean I've shopped around for scripts before--it wasn't too hard, for instance, for me to decide that I like Simple Machines Forum much more than phpbb.

However, it took me literally about 15 to 20 hours of research to come to a decision on which social networking script was right for me. There are several scripts to choose from: Boonex, Dzoic, phpFox, abledating (aparrently a scam),abk-soft(also apparently a scam) and others.(screenshots of abledating from a disgruntled purchaser)

After a few hours of reading social network script reviews in various forums and on many sites, I found myself utterly confused. How could the same script (be it phpFox or abledating) get such positive reviews by one website and such horribly negative reviews by another? As it turns out, there is cut throat competition among the scripts, some have referred to this as the 'script wars' or the 'dating script wars' since these social network engines often are used for the dating sites that seem to be ubiquitous on the internet. It soon became obvious to me (and others from the comments I read on webmaster forums: 1 , 2 ), that the big players in the social network script wars are spamming the internet with positive reviews about themselves and negative reviews about their competition.

If, like me, you find yourself reading forum posts by people who either absolutely love or absolutely loathe a particular script. You have to ask yourself are these people spammers who wrote the script that they love?

Suggestions reading reviews about any social networking script

• Does the review have any affiliation with the script?

1. For instance The site :http://www.abledatingreview.com provides very positive reviews for the able dating software (aka abk software). My hunch is that http://www.abledatingreview.com is just a fake site created by the very people who make the abledating software suite.

• Regarding posts made in forums like DigitalPoint or SitePoint, you have to try to become a Private Investigator of sorts. Your goal is to determine how credible the post is becuase you'll read lots of questionable reviews. : If you read a forum post, pay close attention to

1. Is the user who wrote the post banned? (sounds obvious, but I had never trained myself to look at whether the forum poster was banned, and several of the reviews were written by people who were banned)
2. How many posts has the user made? And what do the other posts of this user say? If someone on a forum, has only made 4 posts which are positive about 1 particular script and negative about all the others--and this sort of spam is exactly what you'll find on the forums-- well, I think you can connect the dots about the credibility of that user's reviews!

Other factors you might want to consider before purchasing a social network/dating script

1. Real world example sites: Can you find real examples of sites that use the software? One of the reasons I went with phpfox is that I found several sites that use the software, and those sites loaded quickly and looked good. (Just do a search 'powered by phpfox') I couldn't find any sites powered by abledating, abk-soft, another strike against that company. I did find some sites that use boonex such as http://www.4ppl.com/ .
2. Is the source code encoded? Phpfox is not. Boonex is not. I can't remember about Dzoic but I read that abledating is encoded. (again, research on your own about the last two, as I can't remember at this point) If the source coded is encoded, you better like the way the script works out of the box or be willing to pay the script creators to do any mods.
3. Mod Community: If you are not a programmer, you probably want to research whether or not there's an active community of people who you can pay to mod the script. I think Boonex has that. PhpFox also has an active community of modders
4. Quality of Code: If you are a programmer (and even if you're not), you want to have well designed code and a well-architectured script. Being a programmer and the guy who was going to go under the hood and customize whatever script we went with, my biggest fear was that I would lay out $400 bucks or so and then get completely crappy code. On this front, I can only speak to phpfox's code: it is indeed very well written with a sophisticated architecture. It uses OOP, smarty templates and a highly modularized, template-based system that, at first, might seem overwhelming, but soon enough is obviously powerful in the flexibility that it gives programmers. They've done a great job separating code from design. Everything is object oriented! (yea!). If you're thinking about using boonex, you should be able to see its source code since you can get a free version. If it's not a free script like Boonex you, unfortunately, probably have to cross your fingers and wait to see what the code that you purchased looks like!
   

After I spent a good deal of time trying to find the best social network script, I decided to go with PhPfox a company that I have no other affiliation with (other than being a satisfied customer). That said, please remember that PhpFox is the only social networking script that I have athorough and direct knowledge of. For all that I know, Dzoic or SocialEngine might be great. What I would urge you is to take the advice in this post. If you don't, you may end up like some of the people on digitalpoint who were very angry that they laid out several hundred dollars for a partially functional and encoded script from a company that did not offer refunds or technical support.

MySql: error: 'Access denied for user using password: YES)'

Just wanted to post this in order to, possibly, prevent other people from a bit of frustration when attempting to connect to a MySql database. I am int the  process of creating a private tutoring services site that makes use of PhpFox's social network script. Anyway, after creating the database in cpanel  , and adding a user I tried to connect to the database. It turns out the MySql error message that I got "Access denied for user using password: YES)'' . Now, I knew that I wasn't using 'YES' as a password! What the hell!   However, it turns out that , MySql generates this error to mean that I was indeed trying to use a password(hence the "YES").

Bitmapdata .disose()

This is just some venting...I am working a fraction game..i've tentatively called "Fraction Wars"..basically you blast up equivalent fractions. Anyway, I'm using a fair amount of blitting ala 8 bit rocket style. I decide to create and cache some text animations that use this blitting technique. The logic is that I would cache all the text animations that were likely to occur during the more intense parts of the game and then just blit them to the main canvas, a single bitmapdata object that spans most of the screen. (for in between levels when not much action was occuring, I used regular old text fields and transitionmanagers).

The morale of my wasted time is that bitmapdata's dispose() method is DESTRUCTIVE. Only use it if you don't need ANY reference that given bitmapdata. I knew this before today , just didn't see how it



I wasted more time than I care to share over the following embarrising fact that I had a timer loop that

1) created new bitmapdata by drawing from a text field
2) store bitmapdata in a slot in an array
3) before moving on to the next iteration of the timer, I called .dispose() on the new bitmapdata

I know it seems obviuos now

Randomize Elements in an Array

I had to rewrite some code that randomized elements in the new Vector class (had written the code below to randomize array elements)and thought I'd post both the old array randomizer() here. nothing fancy at all...just thought might be useful to someone.

var myArray:Array =[1,2,3,4,5,6];

function randomize(arr:Array):Array{
 var originalA:Array = arr;
 var newA:Array=[];
 
while(originalA.length > 0){
 var index:int = int(Math.random() * originalA.length);
 var element = originalA.splice(index,1);
 //splice returns an array.
 newA.push(element[0]);
  
 }
 
 return newA;
 
}

trace(randomize(myArray));

Note: the splice() method of the array class actually returns an Array made up of the elements you've spliced out of the original array. This is why we need to push element[0] into the new randomized array.

Loading External BitmapData into Vector of Type BitmapData

I'm working on a math game that requires many external images to be loaded into Actionscript 3's new Vector class (typed array) . It took me a bit of experimenting to determine how to properly load external images into a Vector of type BitmapData. Before the new the typed arrays of our new Vector class, I didn't have to worry about the type of the data that I was storing (arrays can handle any type)...now, it's a whole new ball game

. In the end, you just cast the content of the loader object to a Bitmap then access that Bitmap's ".bitmapData" property...see a simplified version of my code below.




//Here's my BitmapData Vector
var explosionVec:Vector. = new Vector.();

//load external png
var _loader = new Loader();
_loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loaded,false,0, true);
_loader.load( new URLRequest("bath/To/Image/explosion.png"));

//
function loaded(e:Event):void{
//cast content to bitmap
var bmp:Bitmap = Bitmap(_loader.content);
//store the bitmapData from the Bitmap!
explosionVec[0] = bmp.bitmapData;

}

Vectors! Typed arrays come to Actionscript 3

Finally got my hands on CS4... one of the main new new perks of the Actionscript is the new Vector class (nothing to do with physics or vector graphics)...these are good old typed arrays in the style of C++ or Java.

Basics of the Syntax

//create a Vector and call it vec

var vec:Vector. <int> = new Vector.<int>();

now "vec" can only store ints! This allows for Type-safety in your code, and potentially performance gains.

to add an object to a vector just call .push()
//the next line adds the int '3' to the vector
vec.push(3);



Much more info over at Senocular

Bitmapdata Image Effects in Actionscript 3 demo with code

Well, I started this Blog for a few reasons, one of which is to share code that others might find useful.. Toda I had to create some classes that I assumed would be easy to find on the internet...well, now they are (at least if you can find my blog) Aside from teaching, I work on several websites and am currently doing some work on site for a Dentist's website...anyway, I needed an image slideshow that would provide some neat transition effects.

I expected to be able to find something on the web that I could just copy paste and pawn off as my own, but there was nothing out there that was perfect. There's something close at Flep Studio. However, after downloading their code I realized, I'd just have to write my own to acheive what I wanted.


In the end, my code is pretty far from Flep Studio. I ended up writing 2 distinct Actionscript 3 classes that manipulate Bitmapdata. It was easier to create a separate object for each square that would flash bright white then fade away. The codes' much sloppier than it could be, but if you like the code you can download the source (.fla and classes). If you're going to just copy and paste this code, you will need some images in your library. The ImageTrans class which is the document class assumes that there are five images (jpg, png or whathave you) with the following linkage identifiers

• Picture1

• Picture2

• Picture3

• Picture4

• Picture5

You can see the final product below.

package{
import flash.display.MovieClip;
import flash.display.BitmapData;
import flash.display.Bitmap;
import flash.geom.Point;
import flash.events.TimerEvent;
import flash.geom.*;
import flash.display.*;
import flash.net.*;
import flash.events.*;
import flash.geom.*;
import flash.utils.*;


public class ImageTrans extends MovieClip{



private var timer:Timer;
private var updateInterval:int = 10;
const NUMBER_ROWS: Number = 13;
const NUMBER_COLS:Number = 13;
var currentRow:int=0;
var currentCol:int =0;
private var index:int =1;


private var currentBD:BitmapData;
private var nextBD:BitmapData;
private var canavsBD:BitmapData;
private var arrayofImg:Array;
private var bmp:Bitmap;

//delay betwen pics
var delayTimerTimer:int =1000;

private static var delayTimer:Timer;




private function initOnce():void{
FadingBD.setRoot(stage);
delayTimer = new Timer(delayTimerTimer,1);
arrayofImg = new Array();
canavsBD = new BitmapData(stage.stageWidth*2,stage.stageHeight*2,false);
arrayofImg.push(new Picture1(0,0) );
arrayofImg.push(new Picture2(0,0));
arrayofImg.push(new Picture5(0,0));
arrayofImg.push(new Picture4(0,0));
arrayofImg.push(new Picture3(0,0));


canavsBD.copyPixels(arrayofImg[0],arrayofImg[0].rect,new Point());

currentBD = arrayofImg[1];
nextBD = arrayofImg[2];

bmp = new Bitmap(canavsBD)//canavsBD);

addChild(bmp);
timer = new Timer(updateInterval);
timer.start();
timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER,go,false,0,true);





}


public function ImageTrans():void{
initOnce();
}


function nextOne(e:TimerEvent):void{
var nextIndex:int;
index++;

if(index == arrayofImg.length-1)
nextIndex=0;

else
nextIndex = index+1;

if( index == arrayofImg.length)
{
index = 0;
nextIndex = 1;
}
currentRow=0;
currentCol=0;

currentBD=  new BitmapData(nextBD.width,nextBD.height);
currentBD.draw(arrayofImg[index] );

nextBD= new BitmapData(nextBD.width,nextBD.height);
nextBD.draw(arrayofImg[nextIndex]);


}


public function go(e:TimerEvent):void{



var w:Number =currentBD.width/ NUMBER_COLS;
var h:Number = currentBD.height/NUMBER_ROWS;

var rect:Rectangle=new Rectangle(w*currentCol-1, h* currentRow-1,w+2,h+2);
var _point:Point =new Point( currentCol*w, currentRow*h);

//add one point toeither isde to make up for any small gaps in bitmapdata size
var tmpBd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(rect.width,rect.height,false);
tmpBd.draw(currentBD);
canavsBD.copyPixels(currentBD,rect, _point);

var f:FadingBD = new FadingBD(rect,_point,tmpBd);
stage. addChild(f);

if(currentCol != NUMBER_COLS)
 currentCol ++;
 else if(currentCol == NUMBER_COLS )
 {
  currentRow++;
  currentCol=0;
 }


if(currentCol == NUMBER_COLS && currentRow == NUMBER_ROWS )
delayNext();
}

private function delayNext():void{
delayTimer.start();
delayTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE,nextOne,false,0,true);


}




}


}//end of imageTrans class

package{
import flash.display.*;
import flash.filters.*;
import flash.geom.*;

import flash.events.*

public class FadingBD extends Sprite{

private  static var rootRef:DisplayObjectContainer;
private var mc:MovieClip;
private var  rect:Rectangle;
private var _point:Point;
private var myBd:BitmapData;
private var bmp:Bitmap;


public static function setRoot(t:DisplayObjectContainer):void{
rootRef = t;
}

public function FadingBD(r:Rectangle,p:Point,bd:BitmapData){

rect=r;
_point =p;
myBd = new BitmapData(r.width,r.height,false,0xffffff);
bmp = new Bitmap(myBd);
mc = new MovieClip();
mc.addChild(bmp);
var b:BlurFilter =new BlurFilter(4,4,1);

mc.filters =[b];

rootRef.addChild(mc);
mc.x =p.x;
mc.y=p.y;

addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,go,false,0,true);
}

private function go(e:Event):void{
mc.alpha -= .1;
if(mc.alpha <= 0)   end();  }   private function end():void{  removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,go);  mc.removeChild(mc.getChildAt(0));  rootRef.removeChild(mc);  bmp=null  myBd.dispose();  mc.filters=[];  mc = null;  myBd.dispose();  myBd = null;   }              }   }