WSN Classifieds

Updating Software Listings

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:06:13 GMT

WSN Software Directory comes with thousands of listings, but you'll notice that these listings have old information in them. You'll need to regenerate them in order to get the latest versions of the software reflected. Go to Admin Panel -> Maintenance -> Regenerate and check the "Do PAD file updates?" box. Please note this requires pulling up tens of thousands of web pages to read the PAD files so it will take several days -- leave it running in a background tab in your browser.

Note that software listings regenerate automatically every 30 days if you get enough website traffic, but if you don't have enough people hitting the site then there aren't enough page loads on which to run those updates.

To get PADs updated automatically regardless of site traffic, use your website control panel (such as CPanel) to create a cron. There should be a page labeld crons or schedule tasks. Schedule the command
wget -O /dev/null "http://installpath/index.php?action=padupdatecron"

to run once per minute minute -- that equates to 43,000 times per month which means at least 43,000 updates can be processed.

If you want to add more PAD files in bulk (instead of just updating existing ones), you'll need to find a provider. One option is http://www.qarchive.org . Download http://www.qarchive.org/repository/trusted.csv from them. Then in WSN go to Admin Panel -> Additions -> Add Listings -> "PAD CSV Import" and check the "Do PAD file updates?" box. upload the modified trusted.csv file there.

Reloading WSN's Repository

WSN provides two sets of softare data -- a human-moderated set of ~18,000 quality listings (courtesy of qarchive.org) and a larger unmoderated set. You can reload the moderated set by gonig to youradminpanelurl/loaddata.php?filled=1&datasource[0]=padlistingsalt&dataindex=0&part=0&dataindex=0 and the unmoderated set by going to youradminpanelurl/loaddata.php?filled=1&datasource[0]=padlistings&dataindex=0&part=0&dataindex=0

Be aware that you're wiping your site data in the process and starting over.

Reloading From Another Source

If you want to replace WSN's default set with a set of PADs you've found elsewhere, and you want to wipe the database before importing so that you only have the new prefered set, then go to Admin -> Miscellaneous -> Advanced and running these lines in the SQL box:

TRUNCATE TABLE {PREFIX}links;

TRUNCATE TABLE {PREFIX}comments;
TRUNCATE TABLE {PREFIX}attachments;

TRUNCATE TABLE {PREFIX}tags;

TRUNCATE TABLE {PREFIX}ratings;

TRUNCATE TABLE {PREFIX}categories;

Then in WSN go to Admin Panel -> Additions -> Add Listings -> "PAD CSV Import" and upload the PADs source you want to use there.

Bulk Addition of Categories

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 11:31:13 GMT

Sometimes you may need to add a bunch of categories where only the title is uniuqe, all other fields can be the same. To do this, add a category with the name title1[,]title2[,]title3[,]title4 ... this will cause four new categories to be added named title1, title2, title3 and title4. You can add as many at once as you need, just separate each name with [,]. Note that all the new categories will become children of whichever category you selected as the parent, and they'll share all other info as well, so if you need unique descriptions for each this may not be useful to you (though you could edit the descriptions back in later, leaving it blank initially).

For more complex bulk addition of categories and subcategories, go to Admin Panel -> Categories -> Add Categories and use the bulk add options there. You can add them to a specific parent or add a set of subcategories to all categories at a specified level. You can also import a CSV or other flatfile database of categories.

Regenerating Counters

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 22:33:24 GMT

The Admin Panel -> Maintenance -> Regenerate page allows you to get some cached database values updated. Regenerating counters allows you to clear up problems that may be caused by directly inserting data into the database, or which in some cases may even result from normal usage. When categories are moved or you change the template code for displaying subcategories, you may need to regenerate categories.

Regenerating categories is the most common process you may need to go through. When you have many levels of categories and you change a category name, it may require regenerating categories for all of the subcategories of this category to properly update their 'parentnames' field to display the changed name in the navigation. If you're using mod_rewrite with category names, this becomes essential to keep the paths up to date -- without the regeneration, you would run into dead links in trying to navigate back up from below the category.

When you move a subcategory to a new parent, the totals will be off until you regenerate categories.

When you move your entire site to a new URL, you'll need to regenerate all counters.

Any direct insertion of data to the database, such as if you're importing from another listings script, will require going through all the regenerations: listings, categories, comments, members, category selector and totals.

Note that regenerating totals is useful if you ever suspect that the number of listings, categories, etc listed on your main page is inaccurate.

Regnerating the category selector / sitemap will update the category selector in the wrapper, on the submit/edit pages, and the site map (that's sitemap.php, not the google sitemaps).

Passwords

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 20:25:14 GMT

By default no passwords are stored in the database in their original form. All passwords are recorded in the database as hashes. This way if a hacker gains access to your database the passwords themselves would not be of much use to them -- protecting your users who may unwisely use the same password on your site that they use for their bank.

The hashing method can be configured at Admin Panel -> Members -> Member Settings -> "Password encoding method". The default on a new WSN installation is double MD5 with salt -- the salting makes it extremely hard for criminals to reverse the hash. Upgrades from older WSN versions may still be using plain MD5, which used to be the default.

The other option is "no encoding" which means plain text. While storing passwords in plain text is a poor security practice, it does have the advantage of making it possible to lookup or retrieve a password instead of having to reset it to a new one. If you set password encoding to plain text, members who fill out the lost password form will get their existing password emailed to them. WIth any other selection, they instead get a new randomly generated password emailed to them. Once they use the new password to login they can edit their profile to change it to something more memorable.

When you change the password encoding setting, current members are not immediately affected -- their passwords remain in their current encoding so that they can continue logging in as usual without having to do a password reset. However, the next time they do reset their password the encoding for their account will automatically change to the new selection.

Changing your titles

Tue, 04 Nov 2003 17:52:03 GMT

On a new install, all navigation links begin with 'Directory' and your page titles will be "Directory: Section". You're going to want to customize these to something appropriate for your website. Go to Admin Panel -> Customizations -> Page Titles to set all your page titles. This page allows you to change the titles to existing pages, to new pages you create, and also change the scheme of how titles are organized.

If your site is multilingual, note that you're always editing the titles in your current selected language. Change your language in your profile and come back to the page titles page to edit the titles in a different language.

Advanced user note: You can also set the title of a page within a custom template, by using  anywhere in the template... however, that method isn't multilingual.