What would you say to newer members of the CD community?

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by mocat1530

I would also like to see some how-to's for folks who are new to the whole forum concept. When you decide to reply to a post what are all those buttons? What do the response fomatting icons really do? What is a PHP tag? The big thing I have searched for is the how-to on adding quotes to your responses. I can make the shaded box, but where does the "originally quoted by" come from?

I took me several months to discover all the features on these forums. I've started working on a Hitchhiker's Guide to Chief Delphi that goes and explains what anything and everything does with screenshots of the many of the features. So far I have about three pages written. The paper would focus on learning all the feaures of Chief Delphi, like learning what all the buttons do in the posting area do, how to do all the profile settings/avatar/who am i?, what UFH and WFA are, about CD-Media, CD-Swap, and CD-Event, what the spotlight list is, what is appropiate for signatures and avatars, etc. Almost like a giant orientation video.

To help answer your question, the PHP tags are only need if you have PHP code to post. The PHP tag will color-code the PHP code depending on it's syntax. Here is an example use of the PHP tag:

PHP Code:

<?php 
/**
 * Directory File Size Generator
 * Author: Arthur Dutra
 *
 * Function Syntax = getDirectorySize([directory_location]);
 **/
$totalsize = 0;
function getDirectorySize($dir, $pos=2){ 
    global $totalsize; 
    if($pos == 2) 
    $handle = @opendir($dir); 
    while ($file = @readdir ($handle)){ 
        if (eregi("^\.{1,2}$",$file)) 
            continue; 
        if(is_dir($dir.$file)){ 
        getDirectorySize("$dir.$file/", $pos+3); 
    }else{ 
        $size=filesize($dir.$file); 
            $totalsize=$totalsize+$size; 
        }    } 
    @closedir($handle); 
    return $totalsize;
?>

And here is how you get the "originally posted by" in the grey quote box:

Originally Posted by username

Their quoted text.

If you want to see exactly how these were used, click the at the bottom right part of this quote in order to see the code used.