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Installing Matt's WWW Message Board Script

WWWBoard is an interactive message board which can add new dimension to an otherwise two-dimensional web site. WWWBoard visitors can post new messages and allows others to respond directly beneath the original post. The site webmaster will have password protected access to an administrative interface to maintain board content.

This is one of the more popular message board system's available on the Internet. It can be found at Matt's Script Archive, along with hundreds of other useful scripts. Please visit Matt's Script Archive to download the actual script.

The following files should have come with WWWBoard Version 2.0 ALPHA 2:

ALPHA-2 - READ THIS.
README - The necessary Install Instructions. This file.
wwwboard.pl - The Perl CGI script that runs everything.
wwwboard.html - The HTML WWWBoard file that users will see.
faq.html - An FAQ file displayed for users of wwwboard.
data.txt - Where the file number is stored.
messages/ - Where the messages will be created and stored.
wwwadmin.pl - An Admin tool to delete messages.
passwd.txt - The encoded password and username for WWWAdmin
ADMIN_README - WWWAdmin README file.

You will need to edit by hand several of the files that come with WWWBoard Version 2.0. Below is a description of how to modify all of the necessary files:

wwwboard.pl

This file must be placed in your server's cgi-bin. The file must also be chmoded 755.

This is the most complicated file you will need to modify. It comes with a lot of variables and many options. Below is a summary of how to configure all of the variables and what the options do:

Variables

$basedir = "/path/to/wwwboard";

This variable should contain the absolute system path to your wwwboard directory. For our accounts, the system path to your root directory is /home/userid/, where "userid" is your account userid. So if you decide to create a new directory called 'wwwboard' to store this message board, then $basedir would be set to: /home/userid/wwwboard.

$baseurl = "http://www.yourdomain.com/wwwboard";

This is the base URL to the directory where wwwboard is kept. So staying with the example above, if your main directory is called by: http://www.yourdomain.com/, the $baseurl would be set to: http://www.yourdomain.com/wwwboard/.

$cgi_url = "http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/wwwboard.pl";

This is the URL that points to wwwboard.pl. This will be used in followup form responses, so this must be correct.

$mesgdir = "messages";

This is the name of your messages directory which will be appended to $basedir. All of the messages for wwwboard will be created and held in this directory.

$datafile = "data.txt";

This is the name of the data file which will also be appended to $basedir. It will hold the current filename count, and the script will read this in and determine the message filename from this file.

$mesgfile = "wwwboard.html";

This is the name of the wwwboard.html file, which you might want to rename to index.html for the sake of a shorter URL. It will be appended to both $basedir and $baseurl to determine the URL and the absolute path to this file, both for URL references by the script and for editing of this file by the script.

$faqfile = "faq.html";

This is the path to the faq.html file which will be appended to $baseurl so users can find their way to the Frequently Asked Questions file about WWWBoard.

$ext = "html";

This is the ext with which all individual files will be created with. Most of the time it should be left as html, but on the occasion when you may be using this on a dos based platform you can switch it to 'htm'.

$date_command = "/bin/date";

This needs to be the path to your 'date' command (ours is /bin/date. This script uses the date command to time stamp the messages individually with along date and to place a short 'added' date on the wwwboard.html page.

$title = "WWWBoard Version 2.0 Test";

This is the title of your WWWBoard, which will be used on the individual message pages. Call your message board whatever you like, but I do recommend changing the above to something a little more catchy. :-)

Options

$show_faq = 1;

This option allows you to choose whether or not you want to display a link to the FAQ on every individual message page or not. It defaults to 1 and the link will be put in at the top of the message along with links to Followups, Post Followup and Back to $title. Setting this to 0 will turn it off, and keeping it at 1 will keep the link.

$allow_html = 1;

This option lets you choose whether or not you want to allow HTML mark-up in your posts. If you do not want to allow it, then everything that a user submits that has 's around it will be cut out of the message. Setting this option to '1' will allow HTML in the posts and you can turn this option off by setting it to '0'.

$quote_text = 1;

By keeping this option set to 1, the previous message will be quoted in the followup text input box. The quoted text will have a ':' placed in front of it so you can distinguish what had been said in the previous posts from what the current poster is trying to get across. Setting this option to '0' will leave the followup text box empty for the new poster.

$subject_line = 0;

There are three options for the way that you can display the subject line for the user posting a followup. Leaving this option at '0' which is the default value, will put the previous subject line into the followup form and allow users to edit the subject however they like. Setting this option to '1', however, will quote the subject, but simply display it to the user, not allowing him or her to edit the subject line. The third and final option can be achieved by setting the $subject_line variable to '2'. If it is set to '2' the subject will not be quoted and instead the user will be prompted with an empty subject block in their followup subject line.

$use_time = 1;

This option allows you to choose whether or not you want to use the hour:minute:second time with the day/month/year time on the main page. Day/Month/Year will automatically be placed on the main wwwboard.html page when a new entry is added, but if you leave this variable at '1' the hour:minute:second time will also be put there. This is very useful for message boards that get a lot of posts, but if you would like to save space on your main page, you can set this to '0' causing the hour:minute:second display not to be added.

wwwboard.html

wwwboard.html must be placed in the directory that you defined in $basedir of your wwwboard.pl file. It must be chmoded 777 so that your web server's uid (User ID) has permission to write to this file.

This file needs much less editing than the wwwboard.pl script. There are three things that you will want to edit in this file. The first two are simply the title of your WWWBoard. Currently the two lines look like:

<title>WWWBoard Version 2.0!</title>
<h1>WWWBoard Version 2.0!</h1>

You will want to change the title and header "WWWBoard Version 2.0!" to whatever you want to call your WWWBoard. This should probably be the same as the variable $title that you defined in wwwboard.pl.

The third line in this file that you will need to edit is the one that looks like:

You need to change the URL that is in action="" to the same URL that you defined in wwwboard.pl as $cgi_url.

Once you have made these changes you can exit this file and save it.

faq.html

This file does not need to be edited, unless you want to change the heading or title or add a link back to your wwwboard page.

It should be placed in the $basedir directory and its name should reflect that of the $faq_file variable defined in wwwboard.pl

It should be chmoded 744, so that it is readable by all.

messages/

This is a directory that should also be placed in $basedir as defined in wwwboard.pl. This directory must be chmoded 777 so that messages can be written into it by the server's UID.

data.txt

Simply place this file into $basedir as defined in wwwboard.pl and chmod it 777 so that the web server can write an incremented number to it. This is where the file name number will be kept.