Joined Chris Graham behind the scenes in the development of Composr CMS in 2016.
Took on the lead developer role in 2023 when Chris Graham stepped back to attend to his new lifestyle changes.
Spearheaded the development of Composr CMS v11 and the new website, Composr.app.
Formed the company PDStig, LLC to take on professional support and development for Composr CMS users especially after the discontinuation of ocProducts, Ltd.
Structure: Composr's forums follow a hierarchical structure. You can create forum groupings, forums, and sub-forums (and sub-sub-forums etc) in that order of hierarchy.
Strategies: Avoid creating too many forums, which can dilute activity. Start with a few well-defined forums and expand as needed.
Permissions: Use Composr's permission system to control access to forums and features. For example, you can create private staff forums.
Composr provides several tools to help you stay up-to-date with forum activity:
Virtual Forums: Special forums like "Posts since last visit" and "Topics with unread posts" provide filtered views of recent activity.
Read Status: Topics with unread posts are displayed in bold with a jump-to-first-unread link. You can manually mark topics or entire forums as read or unread.
Notifications: You can enable email notifications for specific topics or forums, either manually or automatically based on your activity.
What security measures should I consider for local payments?
Answer
While Composr supports local payments (Authorize.Net), it requires high PCI compliance. Ensure you adhere to the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) guidelines, including secure coding practices, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, regular security audits, and staff screening.
Composr provides tools for monitoring your eCommerce activities:
Sales list management: Cancel purchases, view sales history, and manage refunds (Admin Zone > Audit > eCommerce > Sales list management).
Charts: Generate profit/loss accounts and cash flow diagrams for specific periods (Admin Zone > Audit > eCommerce, and Admin Zone > Audit > Site statistics).
Manual transactions: Record transactions outside of Composr for accurate accounting (Admin Zone > Audit > eCommerce > Manual transaction).
Monetary payments: Issue refunds through your payment gateway.
Point payments: Manually refund points through the points system.
Cancellations: Cancel purchases in the Admin Zone to allow repurchasing. Remember to manually undo any associated actions (e.g., removing name highlighting).
Composr supports PayPal, CCBill, and Authorize.Net for processing payments. While Composr could be extended to support other gateways, doing so may require professional development and customization.
Yes, the unified Composr search system allows users to find downloads based on keywords. This includes searching within download titles and descriptions, as well as within the content of certain file types like PDFs, text files, and even some binary formats (providing they are not too large in size).
Yes, Composr automatically creates a gallery for each download (if the galleries addon is enabled). You can easily add images directly after creating the download or through the download-view screen. The download gallery is displayed within the download-view screen itself.
Are there security features to protect downloaded files?
Answer
Yes, Composr includes security measures to protect downloads.
Protection from hackers: Uploaded files are stored with obscured filenames, preventing direct access and bypassing of the download system. Additionally, an anti-leech feature (when enabled) prevents direct download links from being shared on other websites (this is done by requiring a session ID which is validated against the person / device accessing it and only provided when Composr presents the download links to you on the site).
Basic security: Composr will not let anyone upload dangerous scripts (such as PHP files) which can be executed.
Rootkit detection: The rootkit detection tool under yourbaseurl/rootkit_detection.php can help scan files for shell scripts and backdoors. Composr's Health Check can also do this regularly. Note this only offers very basic detection and will not work for obfuscated backdoors (you should use antivirus to scan for those).
It is the responsibility of webmasters to run antivirus on their site to regularly scan files uploaded to it. Composr does not include antivirus software or virus scanning.
