The first section (see picture below) is the indexing setting for the local site, which is the site on which the AnyBoard application is installed. In our example, the AnyBoard application is installed on the host netbula.com. Since the search engine is installed on the site (the site is local to the application), there are two available index scan method, one is HTTP spiding and the other is file scan. With HTTP spiding, the search engine works like a browser robot, it fetches the first web page, extract the links on the page and then fetches the linked pages, continuing these process until all pages are visited, or a user defined page limit is reached. With the file scan method, the search engine simply opens and reads the HTML files off the hard drive. Clearly, the file scan method is much faster, but the HTTP method is safer, because with HTTP, you can be sure that only those linked pages will be indexed.
In our example, we choose the File scan method, and we also specify the physical path of our web home directory, which is /home/www/netbula.The site refresh interval determines how often the site should be reindexed, here we set it to 72 hours. The maximum index path determines how deep the indexing process should go when chasing the links, 100 is probably more than enough.
The next section allows us to enter additional sites to be indexed. These sites may reside on remote servers. We can set their refresh interval separately, according to how frequent they are updated.
We can setup up to 4 remote sites with this version of AnyBoard.
The next section specifies the constraints of the indexing process.
1) Local file match pattern: this is a PERL regular expression that a local filename must match to be indexed. In this example, all files with extension htm, html, asp, txt, php, jhtml and shtml will be included.
2) URL skip pattern: if a URL matches this pattern, it will be excluded. In this example, all URLs which contains "/cgi-bin/" will be excluded. By using this, you can prevent certain parts of the site to be indexed.
3) Maximum number of files to scan: This is the maximum number of URLs the search engine will try to index. Here, we set it to 25600, if our site has 25601 pages, that last one page won't be indexed.
The next two entries can be used to specify word delimiters for non-western languages.
The "Search result page configuration" is used to set the look of the search result page, such as number of results to display per page, page header and footer.
Finally, there is a check box under the section titled "Index creation confirmation"
If you don't check this box, AnyBoard will save your settings only, it won't index the pages. If this box is checked, AnyBoard will save the configuration AND start walking through the pages and create the index database.
When you submit the form with the index confirmation box checked, AnyBoard will start creating the index database, the process may take a while, depending on the size of your web sites. After that, you can search the web sites.
2. Copy the search box HTML to your site
The default URL of the search form is
http:/your-site/your-cgi-dir/anyboard.cgi?pwsearchcmd=sitesearchform
This link is listed on the master admin panel. You may want to copy the HTML code for the search box and put it on your web pages. You can also use an HTML editor to change the looks of the search box.
The search result looks like the following. You may search for a single word, or search for words with AND/OR conditions.
AnyBoard FormMagic setup and usage
With AnyBoard's FormMagic component, you can create simple and complex web forms with ease, basically, you specify which fields are needed and immediately you have a fully functional web form with functions to submit, view and search the data.
To start using FormMagic, login the admin panel of a forum, near the bottom, there is a button for database management,
clicking on it brings you to the FormMagic admin panel.
When you logon the FormMagic admin panel, it shows various commands at the top navigation and the list of available forms below the top bar. In our case, we have not created any forms yet. Let's create a form and go through the steps.
A) Create a form
Click on the "Create a new form" link, the following page shows
up, enter the form ID "AddressBook". This id must start with letters
and must consists of letters, underscore and digits.
Click on the submit button, AnyBoard creates the new form (with no user defined
fields yet) and brings you to the form management page. It shows the three
steps to get a form to run.
1. Define form elements. You add elements and define their properties in this
step.
2. Configure the form. You add access constraints, layouts, e-mail settings
to the form, and many more advanced settings, such as adding a form to the
AnyBoard message posting.
3. Publish the form. This is the instructions on how to copy & paste or
link the form from another page.
B) Let's follow the instruction and add some elements.
For simplicity, we just add 3 fields, name, address and photo. Photo is a file upload field, so the users of the form can upload pictures. To save time, the add element page allows you to add multiple elements at once.If you plan to use an external SQL database instead of AnyBoard's built-in database, you need to supply the SQL type for the field. This information will be used by AnyBoard to generate the CREATE TABLE statement for the form database.
Upon submission of the above information, you will be returned to the form definition page. As you can see you can delete or modify the added fields.
If you wanted to use an external SQL database to store form data, you need to click on the "Show table SQL" link, then click on the "Create SQL table" link on the page. (Note: SQL support may not be available in lower editions of AnyBoard)
Now that the fields are added, we can start using the form already!
Click on the "Form Submission" link, we will see the following form, put some data in, click submit.
Yes, it worked. AnyBoard thanks you for the using the form. Now, let's check the submitted data. To do so, click on the "Data Index" link.
We see one data entry submitted. You can now view, delete or modify the data. You can also search the data. Try these by yourself.
So AnyBoard's FormMagic component is surprisingly simple, just add some fields, and you have a fully operational form. But, we still need improve the new form a bit. For example, on the data index page, only a date is shown, we need to see the names and possibly other information. We may want an e-mail to be sent to some mail box. We may also want to change the looks of the form...
You can do these in the next step: form configuration.
C) Configure the Form
Click on the 'Configure Form' link. You will see a lengthy form with multiple
sections.
There are many properties and their meaning should be rather obvious.
