The product enables users to submit links under multiple categories. For instance, you can file the link http://www.asp.net under both ASP.NET and .NET categories. The software has an option to upload themes directly from the administrators control panel, but I found it buggy. Even though there was no error while uploading the file, I was unable to view the theme file under the list of all themes. I hope the vendor will resolve this issue in the next edition of the product.

The site administrator will receive an e-mail as and when a new link or review is added to the system for moderation and also receive a notification when a visitor submits a broken link report. This will help them to fix the link immediately. Similarly, when a relevant link is approved, the system will send an e-mail to the user who submitted the link. A complete list of all the features can be viewed at http://www.nicecoder.com/indexu_features.php.

The portal can be managed by logging into the administrator's control panel. As soon as you login, you will view a screen with a lot of options as given below.

Figure 1: Home Page of Administrator Control Panel

Initially, you need to create a few categories so that your users can file links under them. I found that each option has plenty of parameters which you need to set.

Figure 2: Category Addition Page

As you can see from the above figure, the vendor has provided helpful hints below each parameter to assist you and your users during the process. You can directly provide Meta tags for each category. I hope this feature will help web masters to easily optimize their sites for search engines.

After adding the category, the next step is to add links under it. For this purpose, you need to select the first option from the Links panel. An interesting feature which I noticed is that the relevant Meta tags can be automatically fetched from the supplied URL by clicking Fetch Meta Tags button as shown in Figure 3. I feel that this unique feature will help users to quickly add links without any need to manually enter them while posting the link.

Figure 3: New Link Addition Interface

We have so far examined the back end process of the portal and added one link into a category. Let us now view how the link appears on the site.

Figure 4: Users default home page

Figure 5: Link details page

As you can see from the above screenshots, the Tags and Keywords sections are automatically populated with the Meta tags posted on the link page. I do not like this feature as the system adds a lot of keywords which may not be relevant for the link. However, users can edit them if required.

I would suggest the vendor provides uniform naming convention in the future releases of the product. This is because the vendor has given the name as Themes in the installation manual and on the product folder, but it is mentioned as Templates inside the Administrator control panel.