WSN is capable of reading the PAD data format commonly used with software directories. At Admin -> Settings -> Switches you can switch on the PAD option. This will cause a prompt to be shown on the submission page for the submitter to provide a PAD file. In WSN Software Directory, this is on by default and you can install a dataset of tens of thousands of PAD files during installation.

To import a bunch of PAD files with a list of their URLs, go to Admin Panel -> Topics -> Add Topics and use the PAD URL importer or the PAD CSV importer.

Topics which originate from PAD data are periodically updated based on a check for the latest version of the PAD file. You can customize the frequency of this update at Admin -> Topics -> Topic Settings PAD Update Frequency. There are also a couple of PAD-related tweaks you can set at Admin -> Settings -> Tweaks Editor: manualvalidatepad (requires topics generated by the PAD import to be manually validated after import) and manualpadupdates (disables automatic PAD updates).

For Advanced Users

If there are any fields in the PAD format that you want to show the information from, you can add new fields to collect that data. The title (Program_Name), description (Char_Desc_XXX), url (Application_Info_URL), email (Contact_Email), price and everything else that has a WSN-standard equivilant are automatically handled and applied to the appropriate preexisting WSN fields, so you should not create new fields for them. Numerous other fields are handled by WSN Software Directory, but not by the other WSN scripts. For the rest of the fields in the PAD spec, though, you'll need to add fields named as the lowercased versions of the element names in the XML specs for PAD. For example: program_version, author_first_name, city_town. Add what you want, skip the fields you don't care about. The available fields which you might wish to add are listed at http://www.asp-shareware.org/pad/spec/spec.php . Ignore all of the path except for the last bit -- for example, for program cost it lists the path "XML_DIZ_INFO/Program_Info/Program_Cost_Dollars" and so you would add a link field named program_cost_dollars in order to catch that value. To create new fields, see the Add New Fields article.

These are the standard topic fields which are updated from PAD file data: title, url, description, catid, email, tags, lastpadupdate, padfile, address, city, state, country, latitude, longitude, zip, phone, summary, price, address2, currency, program_version, releasedate, primary_download_url, application_screenshot_url, char_desc_2000, program_system_requirements, file_size_mb, program_language, program_os_support, release_status, program_type, authorname, company_name, company_website_url, application_icon_url, metadescription, affiliatesregnowproductid, affiliatesplimusvendorid, affiliatesplimusproductid, affiliatesregnowvendorid