News Writer:How to Construct Multiple Objects on One Website

[jctroy440]

News Writer: How to construct Multiple Objects on One Website.

As the owner of www.bestcasinoonlinenow.com I am affiliated with a sports book, who offers free feeds of live betting odds for customers to view at anytime. I have 45 pages of them and more coming. Offering customers a unique place to go for news about their particular sport is a value added service and attracts more hits to your site. A news service that you can edit on the fly can be very useful for events and news that constantly change as you do not have to constantly upload new pages when the news changes.

The contributors of these add-ons do a tremendous job and should be thanked for their efforts. However when rocket scientists get together and write instructions on how to launch a rocket, it’s usually written for other rocket scientists to read. The average rookie webmaster (me) looks at s these “instructions” and trembles. I need to crawl before I walk.

The News Reader offered by WYSIWYG7 is a good basic design and is relatively easy to install for a single page application. However the instructions on adding multiple pages are a bit vague and confusing to a new webmaster who has never installed this configuration. Here is a step by step “How To” for dummies (like me) on how to put more than one news writer on your site and still get a good night’s sleep.

In my situation I had about 45 pages of live betting odds feeds. Each feed was on a separate page and there was plenty of room on the bottom to put a fairly good sized frame. So it was necessary for me to have 45 different and unique frames. Quite a chore. So here we go, don’t panic.

First, Install the extension from the tools drop down in the WYSIWYG7 program. (I refer to WYSIWYG7 sometimes as W7) After the add-on extension is installed the icon will be in the toolbox on the left and all of the way at the bottom. It reads “News Reader”. If you had the W7 program download your extension the files are probably already unzipped.

Open windows explorer and look in the W7 root directory. You should see the following file, News_db.php. Create a new folder under My Documents called PHP. Make a copy of the file (don’t move it) news_db.php and paste it in the PHP folder. You will need it later.
If you need to unzip the zip, file look for it in the W7/system/downloads directory. It will not be in your Windows Download directory of your desktop. This is not stated in the instructions. Unzip the file into the root or WYSIWYG Web Builder folder and make sure the news_db.php file is there.

You will have to make a few extra setting adjustments and uploads to the server to set this up so be patient. Open the W7 project you want to install the news reader on and open the page that will hold the first news reader frame. Click the news reader icon and draw the frame on the page. Double click the interior of the frame and a properties window will appear. You will be making changes to the following lines; AdminPassword, Database and FrameName. Write down each entry so you don’t forget them.

NEWS WRITER PROPERTIES

AdminPassword: I don’t know if this holds true to all versions but I have found that when you set the AdminPasword you must be sure the original Password is highlighted in blue or the login will not recognize your new password later. If you simple erase the old one and retype the new one sometimes the admin password window just refuses to see it. (No I don’t know why) I tried this several times in different ways with the same results. So be sure and highlight it before you type. It’s just one of the weird quirks of the program. So set your new password then go to the next step.

Database: This is where I got lost the first time. You will see ./news_db.php on the line. Rename the new database by changing anything between the./ and .PHP. For example I have two pages, one named ./nascar.php and one named ./nationwide.php. Be sure and leave the ./ there or the writer won’t work Above is how your renamed data base names will look on the line.

FrameName I recommend changing the frame name to a similar or exact name of the database file. My frames were named; Nascar & Nationwide respectively. It helps when you have 45 pages, trust me.
Do this for both page objects and you will have, one named nascar and the other one nationwide

Now that we have our two objects set up it’s time to make the correct files to upload to the server. Remember the file you copied to the new PHP folder? You need to first rename that PHP file to match your new database names one at a time and copy the newly named files back to the W7 root directory.

Go to your PHP folder and highlight news_db.php then right click and select rename. Type nascar.php and then save it. Click to copy and paste it in the W7 root directory. Go back to the PHP folder and rename the nascar.php file to nationwide.php and copy it to the W7 root directory. Do this for every page entry/object that is going to be separate.

Upload each new renamed file to your server from the W7 root and into the folder that the HTML web pages will be in (usually the root but not always). Then publish your pages.

The file name in the News Writer Properties window should match exactly (except for the./ ) with the file name you uploaded to the root of your server. ./nascar.php is the same as the nascar.php file that you uploaded. This is where your news stories will be stored.
I hope this helped if you are a newbie like I was.

JC Troy is the webmaster of www.bestcasinoonlinenow.com