JavaScript Guest Book Manual

Administration

You need to be in the administrative program in order to configure and maintain the Guestbook System.

If you are not running the administrative program now, please start it up. If you are unsure of how to start it, please open the Installation Help file.

The first thing you'll need to do is to press the Configuration Options Button on the Top Frame of the Admin Screen. Then, when the form comes up, fill in all necessary values in the spaces provided. A detailed explanation of each field and it's use is located directly below the input fields. Once you have that finished, press the re-load button on your browser, then select Guestbook Management from the drop-down list to open the User Admin Program.

Creating a Guestbook

Press the "Create a Guestbook" button in the Left-Menu Frame.

You will be shown a "window" in which you need to enter some basic information.

Guestbook Name: The name of the guestbook. This name cannot have any "spaces" or other punctuation (aside from the underline ( _ ) character in it. (For the purposes of this example, we'll use "my_gb" as the Guestbook Name.

From: Your Email Address goes here.

Home Page: Each message entry has the user's home page attached to it. Enter yours here

Message Text: Enter in some text relative to the subject you entered earlier.

Press the "Create Me" button to create the guestbook or the "Clear Form" button to start all over.

Once finished, you will need to add this guestbook to your configuration. ...

Open the configuration file (Top Menu: Configuration Link) and add this forum to the "List of Guestbooks" entry box on the form (Separate forum names with a space )Then "Save Configuration". This will add the forum to the Drop Down List you see in the Left Menu Frame of the Guestbook Administration Screen.

Deleting a Guestbook

Press the "Delete Forum" in the Left-Menu Frame.

You will be shown a "window" in which you need to enter in the name of the guestbook you wish to delete.

Type in the guestbook name exactly as you did when you created it.

Press the "Delete Me" button to delete the guestbook and all of it's associated files.

You will need to open the configuration file (Top Menu: Configuration Link) and remove this forum from the "List of Guestbooks" entry box on the form. Then "Save Configuration". This will remove the forum from the Drop Down List you see in the Left Menu Frame of the Guestbook Administration Screen.

Viewing and Guestbook Forum Entries

There is a drop-down list of all your guestbook on the Left Menu Frame (The entries in this list come from the "List of Guestbooks" entry in the Configuration Screen.

To open a guestbook, select it from the list and press the "Open Guestbook" button

This will open a window exactly like the window your users will see and interact with, except that it contains some additional administrative buttons.

Delete This Message Button

With a message highlighted, pressing this button will delete only that message

Delete Postings by this Author Button

With a message highlighted, pressing this button will delete all messages posted by this author.

Delete Messages older than [xx] Days Button

Enter in a number of days in the box and press the "Do It" button to delete messages older than that amount of days. This number of days is relative to Exactly 24 hours from the current time.

So, how do you "fire-up" the Guestbook ???

Once you have created your guestbooks, and you have configured your system in the configuration settings form. All you have to do is it from one of your existing (or new) HTML Documents:

http://www.yoursite.com/ccs-cgi/guestbook.cgi (This will attempt to open the default guestbook, "guestbook")

Or, if you wish to call your guestbook(s) individually(From a Link, a Button, a Select List, whatever you choose....) then call them with a URL like the following:

"http://www.yoursite.com/ccs-cgi/guestbook.cgi?action=getall&guestbook=book_name&title=TITLE"

Parameters:

action=getall Tells bbs.cgi to display the message listing.

guestbook=book_name Tells guestbook.cgi the name of the guestbook to load.

title=TITLE The title that displays in the Guestbook Title bar (No Spaces or punctuation)

For example, If your site domain is www.mysite.com and you've placed all of the Guestbook Software into a directory called /ccs-cgi and you wish to open the "my_gb" guestbook (Which you've already created as outlined above), you could call the guestbook with the following code (all on one line, it spans 2 lines here due to space and for readability only):

<A HREF="http://www.mysite.com/ccs-cgi/guestbook.cgi?action=getall&guestbook=my_gb&title=Widgets-Inc&ro=F">
Widgets Guestbook</A>