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.
