Installation & Configuration

Before you start with the installation, you need to check the following:

• Make sure the maximum file upload size of your server is greater than the size of the component zipped kit. If not, contact your hosting provider.
• Check directory write/read permissions and adjust them accordingly. chmod for UNIX, Windows ACL for Windows. Or contact your hosting provider.
• Always backup your website before installing, updating or uninstalling extensions.

To install Wall Factory, go to "Extensions/Extension Manager" in the upper menu of Joomla's backend.

Then, in the "Upload Package File" area click on the "Browse…" button and choose the ZIP file from your computer. After doing so, click on the "Upload & Install" button.

When the installation is finished the following message should appear.

While being free to download and free to use, Wall Factory comes with a variety of features and settings, all these while having no restrictions whatsoever.
Go to Components/Wall Factory/Settings to view all the settings and to configure your component.

From the Wall media section you can enable/disable the following types of media which users can post on walls: images, videos, mp3 files, URLs and regular files such as doc,txt,pdf.
To keep a pleasant aspect of your website, you can also set the maximum width and height of the wall images, in case these are enabled.

Furthermore, on the Miscellaneous section you can allow guests to view walls content and even to write on them if enabled.
You can Enable bookmarks to let users share wall posts on various community websites such as Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. To manage these websites go to the Bookmarking tab.

With Enable Gravatar users can set as avatar their globally unique one from gravatar.com

Enable Router Plugin will change the URLs for walls or posts into short versions such as "wallfactory.com/wall-post" or "wallfactory.com/my-first-post". As the tooltip says, other SEF components/plugins must be disabled in order for the plugin to work correctly and Search Engine Friendly URLs must be enabled.

You can also choose what to be displayed as user's titles, the usernames or aliases.

You can enable or disable Avatars and set a maximum width and height size for them.

Comments section allows you to enable or disable this feature.
In case guests have access to view wall posts you can also choose from here to let them post comments aswell. As a better protection against bot spam you can enable ReCaptcha for guest comments, for this feature to work properly you will need to set up ReCaptcha.

Set up how many Comments per post will be shown, this will not limit the maximum number of comments per posts but will require users to click on View all comments to see the expanded list which contains all the comments on the respective post.

Allowed bloggers tab gives you the option to allow only the selected member ranks to start their own wall.
If you don't want any restriction on this feature you can toggle Allow all users to Yes.
Below these you can also select specific users that can create walls.

Note that disabling this option from a user after he created his wall won't delete it.

In case you have installed CB on your website, Community Builder Integration tab will allow you to install the plugin to display a wall post tab on it.
Here you can also enable the use of Community Builder avatars for users.

ReCaptcha helps you protect your website against bot spam in case guests are allowed to comment on walls.
To add a public and private key simply click on the link provided, follow the instructions on their website and copy & paste the keys on the available fields.

To keep your website civilized and without curses and other inappropriate words, Banned words list allows you to ban them by adding them on the text field. When someone uses any of them, the respective word will become censored.

Wall Factory comes with a Notification system which triggers on various actions:

• New post
• New report post
• New comment
• New report comment

Notifications tab allows you to enable or disable them and to change the message layouts.
In case of new post or new comment you can also enable notifications for followers and even admin.

The Backup and Restore tab allows you to safely make a backup of all the data found in the database except users avatars and folders which will need manual backup.
To make a backup, first choose if you wish to include the settings and bookmarks logos and then click on Create Backup.
Remember to always test your backups, a broken backup is no good later on.

To restore a backup file click on the "Browse.." button and choose the .zip file from your computer, then select if you wish to Append data from the archive to the existing one or to simply erase and replace it.
Click on Restore Backup to begin the process.

On Users section you will find a list of every active user from your website with information regarding what they have posted, how many files uploaded, videos posted, links posted etc.
By clicking on a digit, like for example, on the videos column, it will display a pop-up window containing all the videos posted by the respective user.

To see a more detailed view regarding a user's activity click on his name and you will be redirected to a dashboard with statistics about that user.

Clicking on an username allows you to edit his wall by changing the title, status or even the owner of it.

This section displays a list with reports made by users sorted by posts and comments. As an administrator, you can see the reported items and take the appropriate measures.

With our component users can share their posts with all the media files on many well-known community website such as Facebook and Twitter or on bookmarking-dedicated ones such as Digg or Delicio.us.

Bookmarking tab is the place where you can manage the list of these websites.

Clicking on New will let you add another bookmarking website.
Select the status of it and add a title. Add the link from where the sharing occurs, use the shortcuts found below the field to write the link correctly.
Upload an icon for it and select it's resize values, preferably the same as the other bookmarking websites.

Wall Factory comes with many menu items that you can manage from the Menu Manager:

• Wall - shows the public wall, all posts are found here.
• My Posts - shows user's wall with all the posts made by him.
• New Post - shows a form which helps the user to write a new post.
• My Friends - shows followed walls.
• My Followers - shows user's wall followers.
• Account Settings - shows all the settings available for the user.