Last evening I was looking over a guestbook post page and noticed that my footer information was missing from the page. I investigated the problem but could not put my finger on the specific difficulty. I went to the site from which I had downloaded the script to see if there was any information there. I found that there is a new guestbook script available.

The new script was written to improve the security in the script. It will have to replace the old guestbooks as there is not an upgrade path except by replacement. I will investigate the possibility of data import, but that is not a serious problem as I only have one or two of the old ones up with any data. Worst case would be some copy and paste work with those one or two old books.

The layout of the new script is much easier to work with over-all. There were a couple of gotchas with the installation, but nothing that was not easy to overcome with my current knowledge of web design. Last month it may have been different, but I keep learning.

One problem was that there is a div with an id of wrapper in the script. An id can only be used once on a page so the second occurrence of the id blew the page layout. I changed the id and took care of the problem. The other problem was the use of floats and clearing in the script. To integrate this into my page meant that the guestbook needed to be enclosed in a floated div, a fact that I just picked up in my reading sometime last week. Floating the div meant changing the order of containers on the page, also a recent addition to my knowledge base. I made the necessary changes and uploaded a test page (not necessarily in that order).

I like the new script and would recommend it to anyone looking for a php based guestbook for their site. I look forward to working with it and will be replacing the several instances of the old script that I now have on my sites. The script is free to use and is available from myPHPscripts. It uses a captcha so guestbook spam is minimized. There are several other useful scripts available from the site. Check it out!!