Revision history - see bottom

This plugin will display a random "quote-of-the-day" on the main login page,
beneath the username/password fields.  Nothing spectacular, just a simple
project to teach me the plugin architecture.

To install the plugin:

  1.  Change to the plugins directory.

        $ cd plugins/

  2.  Unarchive the plugin.

        $ tar zxvf /your/path/to/qotdlogin-x.x.tgz

  3.  This should create a qotd_login/ directory under plugins.
      (Note: the web server will need write permissions in this directory)

  4.  Go to the config directory and run conf.pl

        $ cd ../../config/
        $ ./conf.pl

  5.  Choose option 8 and proceed to add the new plugin following
      the instructions there.  Save and exit, and your plugin should
      be in place.

No longer necessary, but optional:
To improve performance, you can schedule a cron job to use lynx to pull a
copy of the remote QOTD web page to your local machine.  The plugin will
look first in its own folder for a copy of the web page, and will only
download from the remote site when necessary.  A sample cron job would be:

0,15,30,45 * * * * lynx --source http://www.qotd.org > /usr/local/apache/htdocs/webmail/plugins/qotd_login/qotd.html

The file created MUST be named qotd.html, and must be located in the qotd_login plugin directory.


Any questions or problems, feel free to contact me:

Tracy McKibben
tracy@mckibben.d2g.com
MSN IM:  mckibbent@hotmail.com

=======================
Revision history
=======================

08/27/02 - ver 0.5
-Changed caching interval to 1 hour for qotd.org quotes
-Added acknowledgement and link to qotd.org for quotes retrieved from
 that site
-Coordinated effort with Van from qotd.org to improve performance of quote
 retrieval from qotd.org
 
06/20/02 - ver 0.4
-Detects if running on Windows or Linux server, to prevent attempts to run 'fortune'
 on Windows
-Built-in caching of quote retrieved from remote site.  Quote is refreshed after 24
 hours.  Improves performance and decreases traffic.
 
04/10/02 - ver 0.3
-Enhanced to use local "fortune" program, assumed to be in /usr/games/fortune.
 Quotes will randomly be pulled from fortune program, or from remote web
 site/local file as before.

03/11/02 - ver 0.2
-Performance enhancement - added ability to retrieve quote from local HTML file.
 Schedule cron job to use lynx to retrieve QOTD from remote web site, saving
 local copy of HTML.  (notes above)
