Grab the latest release on the official GitHub repository and then upload the extracted files in your web server document directory (e.g. /var/www/htdocs or C:\Apache2\htdocs). It's recommended to optionally move the script files to a directory outside the root directory (named in this case “gb/”).

After that, now try to visit your new installation on your domain/IP of your web server and in the directory where you installed it (e.g. http://localhost/gb). If a user listing appears, it means that the script has been installed correctly.

To add new users, go to the “users/” directory, copy those 3 files (the CSS style sheet file is optional) and paste them (or just rename them if you don't want to keep the example user), replacing “example” in the filename with the username you want to create.

After that, go back to your web browser and load the script. The new users should automatically appear in the listing if you have done it correctly.

If you're on UNIX, you must set the users database file (“entries_username.txt”) to 0666 (yes, it sounds very risky) or else PHP will not be able to write new entries and will return errors.

To change global settings in your minigb (which will apply to all users), go to the “cfg.php” file. Please read the comments to find out what actions such variables perform.

Users can configure their own guestbook settings in the “conf_username.ini” file located in the “users/” directory.

At the moment, only these two variables are available to users:

[booleans]
disable_entries = 0/1 ; Disable new entries on a single user guestbook
swatch = 0/1 ; Shows Swatch time on comment dates

To leave a reply to a guest's message, go to your entries text file database and after the guest's comment field you will find an empty one (e.g. <||>Guest Comment<||><||>) where guest comment replies will be stored. Just add some text inside that empty field and save the file. It should look something like this:

An example of an comment reply can be found in the default entries text file database of this script.

Users can customize their guestbook using CSS in the “style_username.css” file. If such style sheet is not found, the default style for guestbooks will simply be loaded.

Any styling done to any class of the default style sheet will be replaced by the user's one. If this does not happen, try adding an “!important” to one of them.