Documentation - Kyara

Installation

1. After unzipping the file, place the "kyara" folder and its contents in the third_party folder of your expressionengine installation.
2. In the control panel, go to "Addons => Modules" and the Kyara module should bve displayed. Click the corresponding "Install" link.
3. In the following page, select "Install" for the Accessory, Extension and Module.

The Kyara module is now installed. To setup and access the module:

1. In the control panel, go to "Addons => Extensions" and click the "settings" link next to the Kyara extension.
2. Enter your product license number you received when you purchased the addon.
3. If you wish to use the character counter in the control panel, check "Show counter for fields in this addon".
4. Click Submit to save the changes.

The Kyara module is available from the control panel under "Addons => Modules => Kyara".

Usage

• Field lengths
• Table encodings
• Database backup

Field Lengths

Change the value of the maximum number of characters that can be entered in a number of fields in the control panel. This can be useful when longer entry titles, member names, channel names, field labels, etc are needed. Longer field labels also facilitates decorating your EE field labels with HTML.

Each row of this section contains the field name as seen in the database, a short description of its role in the control panel, the current maximum allowable characters, and a field to modify this number, respectively. To make modifications:

1. From the Kyara module, select the "Field lengths" tab in the top right of the module.
2. Change the maximum character values for your target fields.
3. To apply the changes, click the Submit button at the bottom left of the page*

* WARNING: Changing database field values is permanent, which means that these values will not revert back to their original values if the module is uninstalled. Setting the field length to a value lower than the original value may lead to truncation of data.
Modifications done here are your responsibility only. We are not responsible in any way for data damage or loss.

Enabling the character counter for fields found in the module

After enabling the included Kyara extension and accessory in the control panel, check the "Show counter for fields in this addon" option in the Kyara extension's settings. A counter showing the number of remaining characters will then appear under targeted fields, such as entry title, when typing.

Table Encodings

Installing addons or upgrading EE can sometimes leave tables in certain collation/charsets, and combined with the "Automatically Convert High ASCII Text to Entities" option set to "No" in the control panel (Admin => Channel Administration => Global Preferences), can lead to foreign and multibyte characters not being saved correctly in the database. In other cases, tables may require a specific collation/charset based on special needs (eg. a database table in your EE installation requiring iso-2202-jp for Japanese). This addon allows the modification of tables containing collation and charset settings to easily fix these problems. To make modifications:

1. From the Kyara addon, select the "Table encodings" tab in the top right of the module
2. A listing of all tables with collation/charset information is displayed. Change the table collation from the dropdown in the third column. You may also set all tables to Unicode (UTF-8) by clicking the "Set all to UTF-8" button in the third column header.
3. To apply the changes, click the Submit button at the bottom left of the page*

* NOTE: Changing the charset/encoding of a database table is permanent, which means that table charset/encodings will not revert back to their original values if the module is uninstalled. Modifications done here are your responsibility only. We are not responsible in any way for data damage or loss.
* WARNING: Changing table charset/encoding can potentially lead to garbled data (eg. garbled characters) in some cases. Please make sure to have a valid and working backup of the database in case a database restore is required. Modifications done here are your responsibility only. We are not responsible in any way for data damage or loss.

Database Backup

Kyara comes with a database backup utility, which sends the backed up database as a file to your browser for you to download for safekeeping. A number of options can control the tables being backed up, the backup file format and name, as well as other database features.

NOTE: Before making any changes in the "Field lengths" and "Table encodings" section, it is recommended to make a backup of your database.

NOTE 2: This tool uses CodeIgniter's internal database backup library, which can at occasion be basic. Due to the limited execution time and memory available to PHP, backing up very large databases may not be possible. If your database is very large you might need to backup directly from your SQL server via the command line, or have your server admin do it for you if you do not have root privileges.

NOTE 3: (especially for users with non-English data): Although backed up text should not contain garbled characters, please double-check that the outputted file contents are well encoded (i.e. text is not garbled).

To backup your database:

1. From the Kyara module, select the "Database backup" tab in the top right of the module.
2. The left table contains all the tables in your EE installation, select the tables you want backed up by checking the corresponding checkbox in the "Backup" column. You may toggle selection of all tables from the checkbox in Backup column header.
3. The right table controls the database file output. Options:
   • Database backup format: You may save the database as plain text (.sql file, "txt" option), or as a zipped ("zip" option) or gzipped ("gzip" option) file.
   • Filename: Write the filename of the output file. MySQL date format is also allowed (eg. %Y%m%d %h:%i%s), similar to ExpressionEngine's date format variables.
   • Add DROP TABLES: Adds the DROP TABLE command in your database backup. If restoring a database, any previous table with the same name as your backed up table will be dropped and overwritten before your table is installed.
   • Add INSERT: Adds INSERT command with your table data to your database backup. Unchecking this option will create an empty table backup with no data rows.
4. To download the backup file, click the "Backup" button. Your file will be available for download to your computer.