"How to ask questions the smart way" as if anybody who would read that much before asking a question would need that help in the first place.

To offer a bit more "terse" guidelines...

1. don't panic
2. read the FAQ first
3. search the site first. like, with the search tool.
4. use clear, simple english.
5. give specific details.
6. thank people.

There good reasons for this that I started to write, but think about them, it just makes sense.

And I just looked at that "how to ask questions" page and it is really really good. If looking at the whole page makes you feel tired, just scroll through fast and read the bold parts. seriously.

The problem with making a detailed non-technical tutorial is, it probably is different for different web hosts. (Unless you have your own co-located server, and if you're paying that much rent you really ought to know what you're doing or hire somebody who does )

If you get a "can't connect to database server" error and you're using settings that your hosting company told you to use to connect, you should probably contact them because it's probably a server problem.

If you get "unable to create table" it just means you don't have the permissions to create a database, and you'll have to either submit a request to your host to get an admin (or admin script) with more rights than you to make one, or you'll just have to add the tables to a database that you already have (which isn't so bad because XOOPS namespaces everything anyway).

Wait a minute -- you said you had a phpMyAdmin control panel. Do you mean you've got a hosting setup that provides a phpMyAdmin control panel, or just that you've downloaded the files? If you've got a phpMyAdmin control panel from your hosting company, then you've got a database from them, too. You just need to make sure you're using the right username and password, and pointing to the right place.

Or if your host has some special procedure for creating a database, you may have to fill out a form or something. Or, if you're managing your server yourself and you don't have a database server at all, you still have to install MySQL I'd go with the latest production release, though XOOPS will run just fine with 3.23.

OK, I've got a core hack that provides this* up athttp://www.nathandial.com/dl/externalTextmod.tar.gz

I have only tested it with toy hacks, because my module-ified bible script makes PHP timeout when it's adding the database. But it looks at least workable. It really wasn't much code, only about 25 lines plus the comments.

edit: *that is, provides modules the ability to add text-modification functions, not that provides the Bible lookup stuff.

Well, in my browsers (Moz 1.1, IE 5, Konqueror) it did this thing where the popup text went to the edge of the screen, and it resized when you moved your mouse around. I did a little more hacking on the DHTML part of it and now at least in Moz it does what I want, it has a fixed-size popup message. I also fixed the goofy grape-ape color . (Only works right now with the phpkaox theme)

Last night I also worked some on the hack that I mentioned, that would allow for modules to offer text-modification functions. I think I've "got it" or at least something that will do it but of course until I've set up a module that offers text-modification I can't see if it works. I decided to make a module out of the little bible-verse-popup script that has a simple, boring page of some sort and provides the text-mod functions--that way maybe it will be a little easier for people who aren't me to install it. The core mod in its current iteration will require a new include file and 3 new lines in module.textsanitizer.php, and maybe a DB table modification, but I think I can work around that at the expense of a little efficiency. If my wife doesn't beat me for programming all evening again tonight, I'll probably have something to show in the morning.

Well, it may look right in IE, but it doesn't in Mozilla. I haven't looked at it in IE. Didn't think about it when I was at home, and my laptop doesn't have Windows on it. The reason it only works for the default and phpaox themes is I edited those two's templates to include the javascript file that does the popups--three or four lines of changes. I didn't get around to editing the x2t theme.

That is some very useful information, supernix. I can't wait to crack open a few Access databases and get into that creamy SQL goodness! Also, that's a nice site! I can tell you've put a lot of time into it.

I've got my Bible-verse-popup thing hacked into the core onhttp://xoops.nathandial.com but it's got a bug in the DHTML that makes the popups look wrong. There are only 3 new lines in the module.textsanitizer.php with the rest in an include file, and I think--though I haven't tried it yet--that it is a "close enough" hack that CVS could still merge basic updates to textsanitizer automatically. Once I've got some time (probably this evening) to get my code presentable (take out the leet-speak comments, etc.), I'll share it with anybody who's interested. (particularly if those interested somebody's can fix my DHTML bug )

As far as the core-mod-for-modular-extension-to-post-editor thing goes, that is kind of complicated, but not a HUGE change, since the structure is already in place for that type of modification (i.e. modules extending functionality of part of the core.) As far as all those mod ideas I had, I didn't say I was going to do all of them, just that they're the type of things that people might like to do with such a feature. Taking the idea further, it might be possible to make the comment editor itself a set of interchangeable modules in such a system. (Not that that'd be a good idea, just one of many possibilities.)

I second that Jeremy, I've already got it "coded" in my head, and now it's just waiting for another weekend if you don't beat me to it. (unless I can figure out a way to make it billable this week Hmm, seriously that might be a possibility )

Probably (hopefully) shouldn't get added until at least after 2.0 goes gold. I've been told that there's already a feature freeze in preparation for such.

Thanks to some babysitting and company coming over, it took longer than Saturday morning to get this far, but I have something at a point where I can put up an "interesting" preview athttp://www.nathandial.com/bible.php . Enter some text in there and some Bible references, with no particular markup. For example just write "Matthew 5:20 is a powerful challenge from Jesus" or "Prov 3:5-7 is one of my favorite passages" or whatever.

As per the beginning of this discussion, I think it would be nice if there was an extension API for modified text display that could be extended by modules. I thought it was really cool that the userinfo.php page automatically used each module's search functionality to make the page. I think that it would be good if the MyTextSanitizer did the same thing (or does it?) and look for modules that had a "text_modification" function that you pass the text of a post and it processes it. I can think of a few cases where this would be useful:

* a "Glossary" that highlighted certain terms and linked them to definitions
* a Wiki that picked out WikiNames in ordinary comments and stories and automatically html-ified them
* a Bible-verse thing such as I'm working on.
* extra pseudo-bbcode tags.

That's just what 0 minutes' thinking brings up. I'm sure there are a lot of things that some modules would like to do. Oh, I just thought of another, you know how Yahoo news takes keywords like "Iraq" and turns them into "Iraq (news - web sites)" I think that's annoying, but it would be something else that a module could provide.

Or is this already setup somehow and I missed it? If it is, somebody point it out please!

Woah. Well, it sounds to me like you could use an "offsite backup" of the results of all that work ...