Customizing Madden Career Toolkit

As of right now, customization is not as easy as I hope it can be in the future. If you are looking to customize the way MADCAT looks and works, you'll need a bare minimum of HTML knowledge and enough confidence to work around the PHP. Those users with HTML and PHP knowledge should be able to do a lot of customization with MADCAT. As it stands, there is still a lot you can do to set your MADCAT-based site apart from others.

The config.php File

As of MADCAT 1.6, your MySQL settings are in _mysql.php, so you don't have to keep typing them in over and over again!

There are several settings that you can change in MADCAT's config.php file. Descriptions of each setting are directly in the file itself. They are all self exlanatory.

Here is an example of how to change a setting:
config.php has a variable that allows you to set the league name for your website. The line looks like so:

$League_Name = "NFL"; // useful if you're running a fictional/custom league

If I was running a franchise website with custom Canadian Football League teams, I could change this value to be CFL. The only thing you change is what is inside the quotation marks. So the line of code would become:

$League_Name = "CFL"; // useful if you're running a fictional/custom league

Changing the values of almost all other configurable values in config.php is the same: just change what is inside the quotation marks. There are a few numerical values that do not have quotation marks around them. In those cases, just change the number to whatever you wish.

Editing the .php Files

While they vary in complexity, I've tried to keep the main .php files as simple as possible as to support customization without knowing PHP. You can happily rearrange most things without knowing PHP. The PHP functions that grab the data from the database are all in the _inc files in the includes/ directory, if you're looking to get into the guts of the system. If you're familiar with SQL and are looking to change what/how stats are pulled from the database, the queries are in 'includes/player_stats_queries_inc.php'.

The Sidebars

Several of the output options can be outputted as sidebars. The PHP that formats these is all in includes/index_inc.php If you look in index.php, you'll also see that you can easily change the headers for each sidebar. I intend to make sidebar customization even better in future versions (eventually!).

MADCAT's Footer

All MADCAT pages output a standard MADCAT footer. The code is designed such that, if you build a template that you'd rather display the footer in, the pages will not output the footer themselves. This allows you to integrate the footer in any way you wish. Please respect the work put into MADCAT and not leave it out of your template(s) entirely.

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