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The user manual that follows is for the BV
News Standard edition. The manual for
BV News Pro is similar, though includes
a section on the wysiwyg html editor. All documentation is included
in the program download zip file.
USER MANUAL
To access the main Admin Menu you will need to type in the following
url: http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/bvnews/bvnews.pl?task=mainmenu
Obviously everything up to and including bvnews.pl must be replaced
with the cgi-bin url specific to your web space [as defined earlier
by the $main_cgi_url variable] then just tag ?task=mainmenu
onto the end to access the main menu.
The first job before you add any new news is to create at least
one news category using the ‘Add Category’ link.Your
site must have at least one Category before you are able to add
any news stories.
In it’s simplest form you may indeed only have one news category,
called ‘General’ or something similar. However on many
occasions you will want to create a number of categories.
Examples where you might want multiple categories is say a sports
site where each player has his own news category. This means that
when you add a news story, it is filed against that player and is
retrievable from that player’s index. Indices can be altered
or deleted as further detailed below.
By filing stories into news categories, the system enables you to
build up an archive of news stories for each category, giving your
news greater longevity, relevance and capability for increasing
page impressions.
OK, so you’ve added a category or two, let’s get on
with the real job of adding some proper news. Most of the menu functions
are pretty self-explanatory, however a few brief notes follow on
their usage. The quickest way to suss out how it all works is to
play around adding, editing and deleting a few stories/categories
and see what effect each has.
‘Add News Story’
Just fill in the headline, first paragraph and main story body and
the script will do the rest.The script does not allow you to insert
html code into stories – if you try then the tags will be
stripped out by the script.
As of script version 1.6, three of the commonest
types of html formatting are now allowed, namely bold, italics and
insertion of links.
Note that these are only allowed within the story body, not the
first para. There
are three sets of tags you must use, either by typing in manually,
or using the links on the ‘add story’ page:
[SBOLD]
[EBOLD]
[SITALIC] [EITALIC]
[SLINK] [ELINK]
Your text or link url goes between the tags, for example [SBOLD]This
text is bold [EBOLD] would appear as This text is bold
in the published story.When
inserting links, they should be in the form:
[SLINK]http://www.google.com [ELINK]Note you must be sure to insert
the ‘http://’ bit, or you will get a reminder from the
script asking you to go back and include it.
By default, the latest story added is placed as top headline on
your site / news front page. Try adding a story and see how it looks.
Don’t forget you can change the look of the page by amending
some of the variables we talked about earlier on.
There is a check box near the top of the form that you can ‘untick’
if you don’t want to publish the story. By ‘publish’
we mean that the story will be available for viewing on the news
front page and within it’s category index page. There may
be occasions where you want to upload a story without actually publishing
it. For example if you want someone else to cast their eye over
it before it becomes ‘public’. In such cases, you should
‘untick’ the check box.
The story can be subsequently ‘published’ using the
‘Edit Story’ function detailed below.You can choose
to include an image with your news story [see later section on uploading
images] by choosing one from the drop down box - or you can create
the news story without an image by choosing ‘None’.
When a story is added, a link is automatically added at the top
of the category to which the story relates – provided it has
been ‘published’.
‘Change Top Headline’
If you want an earlier story to be the top headline on your news
front page, then use this feature.
Choose the story you want to be your top headline from the list
[you are allowed to choose from one of the last 20 stories posted
on the site].
‘Upload Images’
Here you can upload images from your pc onto your server for subsequent
use in news stories.
Choose the image from your pc using the ‘Browse’ button
and then add a descriptive name for the image in the image name
box. Then press ‘Upload Image’ to upload to the server.
Note: Uploaded images will be displayed at 130x130 pixels,
so should be uploaded at that size wherever possible, or at least
'square' eg 100x100 or 400x400. Any uploaded images whose dimensions
are not square will appear 'distorted' on the news page.
‘View/Delete Images’
Choosing this option will present you with a simple list of all
image files uploaded onto your news system. Click on any the links
to view a particular image.
From this page you may choose to either delete the image from the
system or just return to the Admin Main Menu.
If you choose to delete an image, then not only will the image file
be deleted, but the image will be removed from any news story files
containing this image.
The affected news story files will be re-written without the image.
‘Edit News Story’
Using this function you can changed any aspect of a previously published
story, whether it be headline, image, first paragraph, story body
or category.
If the category is changed as part of the edit, then the required
alterations to the category indices are done automatically as part
of the edit.
You can also ‘publish’ previously held stories by ticking
the check box near the top of the form.
‘Delete News Story’
Use this feature either to do housekeeping by deleting old news
articles, or to delete an article you’ve maybe had second
thoughts about.
By ticking more than one ‘check box’ you can delete
multiple stories in one go.
‘Add News Category’
Pretty straightforward really. Just use this to add a new category.
The script checks to see if you are adding a category name that
already exists prior to adding.
‘Edit News Category’
Use this to edit the name of an existing category.
‘Delete News Category’
Does
as it says. An important note here; if you delete a category then
all news stories within that category are also deleted, so use with
caution. |
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