Getting Started with Active PowerBook

Things you should do when you first run Active PowerBook.

(You should print this out and look at it while browsing the PowerBook.)

Go the Control panel

There is a link from one of the default messages that first appear in the Active PowerBook, or you can go to your main Control Panel by going to http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/powerbook/powerbook.cgi?action=control_panel. Obviously you need to replace the path to the script with the one for your installation.

In the Email Info section, PUT IN YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. Please, please do this. Many functions fail because users forget to change the email address from the default to their own.

You also need to put in the path to your sendmail programme if you want to use the email functions. The default settings work for many systems but there are many other paths on other systems so please check with your host.

If your host is NOT using a Unix/Linux system (i.e. they are using Windows) you will not have access to sendmail. If this is the case, you can set the script to use active-scripts.net to handle your mail. This service is limited to a small number of messages per day do if you are a power user with more than 20 message being added each day, you should speak to us.

Choose whether or not to moderate messages by clicking on the Approve Message First option.

In the Style/CSS section, the default settings set various colors for links that appear in Active PowerBook. These settings will override and colors set in the Colors/Images Manager. You can turn off the CSS settings if you don’t want this to happen.

If you want to allow visitors to upload files or images, you MUST fill in the "Full path to upload directory" field. THIS IS WHERE MOST USERS GO WRONG. The upload facility works fine, but many people don’t fill in the correct path. It is not always what you think it is. PLEASE CHECK WITH YOU HOST IF ARE NOT CERTAIN. It will be something like /home/users/guest/www/images/. You will of course first have to create a directory for the images. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT SOME WEBHOSTS DO NOT ALLOW YOU TO PUT IMAGES IN THE CGI-BIN DIRECTORY OR ITS SUBDIRECTORIES.

Then fill in the url of the directory which you want to hold the files/images.

In the HTML section, you can set a header and footer for Active PowerBook. This is a VERY powerful feature because it can allow you to create any page you like around Active PowerBook. You can have menus down the left or down the right, or whatever you like.

Set the Backup email facility to your chosen dates for backups to be emailed to you.

The main page you see is the Message Layout Manager. Here you can choose which field you want to have in your PowerBook. Clicking on Editor in any field will take you to the Field Editor which allows you to control the type of field, font, color etc. By using controls in the Message Layout Manager and the Field Editor you can completely control how the messages will appear.

Here you can set the appearance of all the individual pages that visitors will see including the positioning of text, menus, images etc.

Here you can set the colors and images that form the main pages in Active PowerBook.

There are many more features which you can use but that will do for a start.