In order to use the product, you should first create a
category and post an article under it. For this purpose, you should login as an
administrator by using the default username and password supplied by the
vendor. You will see a page as shown below
Figure 1
As you can see you can easily create and manage categories,
articles by clicking the appropriate links. I have added few articles to the
system. Otherwise, you will not find any content. You can add/modify/delete
categories by selecting Categories link. You can also change the order of them
by making use of Up and Down buttons.
Figure 2
Moreover, you can also nest categories. For instance, you
can add a category named Trackballs inside Mouse category. The product comes
with a rich text box editor for posting content and articles. I also found that
expiry dates for articles can be set only up to the year 2010. I would suggest
the vendor to provide a facility with which editors can publish unexpired
content as it will be tedious to change the expiry dates of each posted article
after 2010.
Figure 3
An interesting feature of the product is that you can grab
RSS feeds from external sites and display them as individual articles either on
the home page or inside the relevant categories.
Figure 4
We have added the fee URL of ASPalliance.com site and filed
it under ASPAlliance category. In order to display the article, you should Grab
RSS by selecting the Grab Feeds link from the administration section. You can
then view the articles on the home page of the site as shown below
Figure 5
The product only displays the abstract along with a
redirection link to the original article. I feel that you can display latest
articles relevant to your site from various sources under different categories
using this feature.
The product also includes a statistics manager with which
you can view the number of hits to various pages of your site. You can also
send newsletters to the members registered on the site. The welcome and
password remainder emails can be customized from the settings area as shown
below
Figure 6
The administration area also includes an option to compact
and repair the database. However, this feature is applicable only if you use MS
Access as the database. I would suggest the vendor to introduce automatic
truncation of database from within the administration area for the benefit of
customers using SQL Server as backend database.
A complete listing of all features of the product can be
viewed at http://www.gazatem.com/products/gnewsPositive.asp#features.
The vendor has also posted few sample sites where the product is used along with
demos of both the front
end and the administration
system so that prospective customers can test drive the features completely
before ordering the product.
