First, let me thank Justin for his help getting the board running.  I really thought I could handle it, but darned if I could figure out what I did wrong.  Anyhow, he fixed it and from then on everything was fine.

Second, let me thank Debbie (debsims58@hotmail.com) for having given me a helpful hint which unleashed my creativity.

OK...the net result is <a href='http://www.dojpride.org/forum.html'>http://www.dojpride.org/forum.html</a>.      Not much traffic yet, because "board of directors" of the organization just let me make it acitve and they have yet to even announce its presence to the membership.  But, it looks kewl...

I changed the icons a bit, used a bit of a trick that allows me to refer to style sheets in the color choices, and then added my own HTML and PERL code to incorporate a few extra features -
1. extra colors for the calendar
2. dont allow automatic registration from anonyomous email accounts or addresses containing forbidden strings defined by the admin
3. lots more detail in the help files
4. fixed the icons for inclusion of BLAH code for tables columns and rows (reversed).

I think it looks really great with textured backgrounds and its 3D effects.  I'm working on creating some automatic backup and recovery techniques and linking the calendar to the main page where we post news, events, and "headlines" so it will automatically display headlines from calendar entries, or vice-versa.

Actually, the "trick" Debbie pointed out (adding other code to the "color" options) could be used for a lot of stuff, but I'm *very* restricted by security and firewall considerations - not to mention a very conservative board of directors.  Those without such restrictions can really go wild... ! 

Awesome board. You seemed to have revise the help files alot Heh, I was kinda lazy at the end of writing them so they were never really finished. Good stuff, though.

Thanks.  I was actually very constrained by the conservative nature of the organization and the fact that most of the members would probably access the site through a very restrictive firewall, so I had to be very cautious with code - anything too fancy would bomb.

I implemented the board for a group at the office, where I am currently engaged as a consultant on other matters.  Most of them are lawyers and bureaucrats that have no expertise with HTML, let alone PERL, so I wanted to try to make it possible for them to continue to use and maintain the board when I leave.  Hence, the expanded help.

Also, I needed to explain the PERL I added, or no-one would know what I did.  I'm maintaining my own record of customization changes with a text file in the MOD subdirectory.

The help files are a little ahead of themselves: I reference a backup and recovery utility I have yet to write.   But feel free to grab them.  I was sloppy with spelling... I keep finding errors to correct when I reread them myself.

Hi.. nice board... I got a question, probably due to not having read through everything though... how'd you get the bars to appear on your board?

I'm currently in the process of converting url]http://pub219.ezboard.com/bshukumei[/url] into http://www.chaotic.co.nz/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl. And for the life of me, have no idea how to change the background underneath the different headings.

Thanks in advance.

There's a thread about how to do that over at Blah Hackz.. Here's a link.

http://www.eblah.com/~blahhackz/Blah/Blah.pl?,v=display,b=Code,m=1041628289

Thanks for that...