Table of Contents
II. Creating and Maintaining Books
1. Using the Master Admin program
2. Creating a new book
(a) using a template
(b) using custom options
3. Modifying a book
(a) book options
(b) field options
(c) html and templates
(d) banning options
4. Deleting a book
III. The User Admin Program
1. Controlling user access
2. Overview of user abilities
Modifying a book allows you to instantly change any options or informaton about the guestbook through your web browser. You can change the maximum number of posts, register bad words, or instantly change the way the entire book looks, all through either of the admin programs.
For this example, we will use the master admin program. The user admin program functions exactly the same as the edit book mode of the master admin program, except that the user admin program will only let the user modify that user's book.
To modify a book, first log in to the master admin program and press the "Edit a VisitorBook" button. The next screen that will appear asks you to select a book to edit. Since you can modify any book you wish, you must select which book specifically you want to edit. You can only edit one book at a time.
The next screen that appears is the main book editing screen. You are presented with a few different panels of controls, each with different functions.
- Basic Options
- This section contains a few pretty simple controls on the book. This section controls how entries are dealt with, from processing bad words to limiting the number of entries. Changes to this section should be pretty straightforward; toggle controls on and off using radio buttons and popups.
- Fields
- This section controls the behavior of the VBPro system and what fields it interprets. You can set which fields are required to contain data by click on the check box for that field in the "Req'd" column. You can also change the form input value, though this is probably not very useful (how often are you going to be changing the names of your form fields?)
- Templates
- By customizing and modifying the templates in this section, you can quickly change the appearence of your guestbook. If you want each entry to look different, or the entry file's layout to be different, you cannot simply edit the entry HTML file! You must instead edit these templates so that the next time the entry file is generated, it will be refreshed based on these updated templates. Note: every time you click "Submit Changes", the admin program will automatically refresh the entry HTML file, reflecting any changes you have made.
- Banned IPs and Words
- This section controls what words are considered "bad", which may or may not be used to screen posts, depending on your settings. Currently, the badwords are simply checked as a whole word, with one word per line. The banned IPs must be in IP format (eg, 192.168.1.5) and not written as hostnames (eg, user005.serviceprovider.xyz will not function correctly.)