Administration

The best part about this script is the ability to approve, delete, modify & ban sites in your database using just a web browser from any computer ! All you need is the master password and you're set. Below you'll find some screen snapshots and admin features.

Link Review

At the end of each day, you go to your Link Review page (if you configured the database to put new additions on standby) , enter your password then the program will take you through each new site that was added to your database. Features include : Modify the contents of the listing (title, description, url etc.) Quick hyperlink (opens new browser window) to look at the user's site first One click lets you change the status to Active If you don't want the site added to the database, just click the delete checkbox You may also ban a URL so the user doesn't keep coming back to add their site over and over If you type any text in the reason for deleting/banning box, that text will be e-mailed to the user so they know why their site was deleted or banned You can also modify a user's category (sometimes people will just add their sites anywhere) Displays the number of links waiting in standby to be approved This is also the same screen you get when clicking on "Edit" next to any URL in the search results when using your master password to edit

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Category Maintenance

This is accessed from your Admin page and requires your master password. Allows you to : Add new categories to the database. Categories are separated by a colon (:) and end with a colon. You only add categories that a site will be listed in. So you wouldn't add a "Business:Companies:" but you would add a "Business:Companies:Law-Firms:". Delete categories from the database View all categories in the database. View all and count totals : this lets you see every category you have, how many people are active and inactive in each category and total listings for your entire database. Ban Maintenance : Same as above .. lets you add/delete and list all URL's that are banned in your database.

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Link Verification

So how do you keep your database current and get rid of those awful broken links ? Easy .. just run link verification from the Admin page (with master password) and it will go through every URL in your database and report the ones that return an error. You may also tell it to search only in specific categories since this can take quite a while. This feature uses a nph (non-parsed-header) version of the script which means the browser will not time-out if it takes too long to find broken links. Before deleting a listing .. you can click on the URL and it'll pop open a new browser window so you can be sure the site returns a NOT FOUND or NO DNS entry error. Be sure to check first since a web server may be temporarily down. If you find the link is truly no longer valid .. then just click the "Delete" link and it's gone There's also a quick link to the Edit screen so you may modify the URL yourself (if you know the right one) or Delete it and send the owner a note.

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Category/Sub-Category HTML pages

Now a user comes to your site but doesn't want to search by keyword .. they want to list all Internet providers in your database. So you'll have to have a front page where they click on "Business" which takes them to another page of links and they click on "Companies" then from there they get another html page and they click on "Internet" then finally "Internet-Providers" and that will then call your search engine and all ISP's will be displayed. Now who exactly is going to create all those category, sub-category, sub-sub-category pages ??? The Search Engine ofcourse ! In your Admin page is a "Create HTML Files" section .. all you do is type in your master password and hit Submit. In no time at all, it will traverse every category in your database and generate the html sub-pages with all the links either pointing to more sub-categories or directly to the search engine. Your variables file contains HTML code so you can control what you want the generated pages to look like. Lets you control both Header and Footer info for the generated pages. Displays a Keyword Search box at the top of each generated page so a user can check "Only Search in Companies:Computers:" Also creates a file called mainindex.html which contains links to the Top categories in your site (Business, Arts, Education etc.) You can control the extension of the created files, so you can have them be .shtml if you wish (incase you already have some other scripts in your site which generate headers/footers) Saves you hours of html editing .. just run the HTML creator whenever you add new or delete old categories.

E-mail Extractor

Accessible from your Admin page (with Master Password) and used to extract e-mail addresses from your database

• Option to extract all Distinct e-mail addresses
• Or extract only those who have their Notify field checked
• E-mails will be generated in plain text format, one per line, so you may import it into any e-mail program (Eudora, Exchange etc.)

Variables

Your variables.pl file is what controls the look and feel of your site.

• $modificationsonstandby (1): When a user edits their listing, it will go back on standby (0):All modifications will stay live in the site
• $defaultnewstatus ("N"):New entries go on standby ("Y"):New entries go live
• $dbnewdays set to number of days a listing will have the "New" image next to the title
• $resultsperpage set to number of results to display per page when searching
• $catresultsperpage set to number of categories to display per page (for category title searches)
• $createdpagestablewidth width of generated HTML category links Tables
• $createdpagescolwidth width of each column in the generated HTML pages tables
• $thankyouforaddingtext text that is displayed to user after they add their site
• $creatingnewtext text displayed to user (under the Continue Button) when adding their sites
• $notifytext message displayed to user when they check the Notify button ("do you wish to be on a mailing list" etc.)
  
  
• remaining variables and routines are well documented in the variables.pl file.