Building Interactive Websites

Free and commercial scripts make your Website a more interesting place to visit.

Scripting: Getting Started

Adding interactive features to your website can be quite simple. But we've never found an easier script to install than NewsPro, from http://www.amphibianweb.com/newspro/. One of the highest rated highest-rated scripts at CGI-Resources.com, NewsPro 3.8 is about as trivial to install as you're likely to find. After installing the required Perl 5 (cross-platform scripting language) software on our Windows NT server, we downloaded and unzipped the tiny (55K) ZIP file, threw the files into a directory accessible by our web server, set the directory's write/execute permissions (as described below) and we were done. If your web server already has Perl installed (most Linux- and Unix-based servers do), you could have NewsPro up and running in about two minutes flat. A number of third-party add-ons are a testament to its popularity. Highly recommended. (You may also want to check out Coranto, which succeeds the now-discontinued NewsPro.)

Here are the steps we used to get NewsPro running on a Windows 9x, NT or Windows 2000 server:

1. Download Perl for Win32 and the MSI installer from http://www.perl.com/ (the installer is not needed if you are running Windows 2000).
2. Once Perl is installed, download and unzip the NewsPro scripts and put them into a web-accessible directory (e.g., /cgi-bin). You do not need to perform CHMOD modifications to the files or worry about ASCII vs. binary considerations if you are configuring the server locally, or with a utility such as VNC, from http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
3. Set the directory's write/execute permissions (accomplished by running the IIS Internet Service Manager, right-clicking the NewsPro directory and selecting "Properties.")
4. If you choose to include the news managed by NewsPro on an HTML page, change the file extension of your news-hosting page to .ASP (not .shtml, as recommended in the instructions for use in Unix environments.) Thus, the HTML code on a page called "somepage.asp" includes a line: <!--include file "news.txt"--> that inserts the news (and a nifty search dialog) automatically.

Discussion Boards

One of the most popular website scripts at cgi-resources.com is a free product, Discus, is now in use on over 30,000 sites throughout the world. It is feature-rich and compares favorably to even its most expensive competition. Discus is available for free use by non-profit and commercial individuals and organizations.

A commercial alternative, and considered by many to be the best web-based Bulletin Board System, bar none, is Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB). This product is the one we use here at PC Buyers Guide, for our Tech Forums. We've looked at other bulletin board systems, including the speedy vBulletin board (VBB) and other SQL- and PHP-based BBS systems but, frankly, the frequent reports we see of security holes (including recently discovered holes in PHP), MySQL database corruption, system slowdowns and other problems, have left us thankful that UBB, NewsPro, Coranto, and their Perl foundations have been, for the past few years, 100 percent reliable. It doesn't get much better than that.

For Further Reading

• See our Flash/LiveMotion page for more info on building interactive websites.
• Also, see our page on Web Design and Programming - Useful Links for more information.
• Visit cgi-resources.com
• Read more about Content Management Systems here.