-> newsportal -> doc -> readme

Introduction

Overview

• index.php shows the available newsgroups of the newsserver (if you have added the names to groups.txt)
• thread.php displays the article-overview of a newsgroup. The articles are displayed in a thread.
• article.php displays an individual article.
• post.php posts a message into a newsgroup.
• attachment.php shows possible attachments of articles.

• config.inc.php contains the configuration.
• head.inc contains the header and the body-tag of the pages. This way the layout of the pages (i.e. the background) can easily be adjusted.
• tail.inc contains the end of every page.
• style.css CSS-Stylesheet for NewsPortal
• lang/deutsch.lang : The German language definitions
• lang/english.lang : The English language definitions (default language)
• lang/*.lang : Other language definitions (currently available are danish italiano dutch turkish norsk slovenski francais czech portugues bosanski spanish finnish polish russian)

Installation

1. download the zip or tar.gz archive
2. unzip it to a directory
3. The file config.inc must be edited with your settings (the most important variables are: $server, $port, $title and $readonly).
4. Write the names of all groups newsportal should show into the file groups.txt. Behind the groupname, seperated by a blank, a description of the group can be added. If the description is missing, newsportal will try to request the description from the newsserver.
5. The spool directory has to be created and configured to grant read an write access to the newsserver: chmod 777 spool
6. Adjust the charset in config.inc.php ($www_charset). If you are in western Europe or the USA the predefined iso-8859-15 charset is correct and you don't have to change it. In eastern Europe iso-8859-2 should be the right setting, and koi8-r in Russia. You may also want to try utf-8 for unicode, that should work everywhere, but not with older webbrowsers and newsreaders.

Configuration

Directories and files

• $file_newsportal="newsportal.php": Name of the file containing the newsportal-functions.
• $file_groups="index.php": The file which shows the list of available newsgroups.
• $file_thread="thread.php": The file which shows the article-thread of a selected newsgroup
• $file_article="article.php": Displays an article. Set this to "article-flat.php" if you want flat-view in your thread (also set $thread_show["replies"] to false later in the thread layout section). Have a look at the Layout Guide.
• file_article_full: In flat-view, the file that will show a complete article
• $file_post="post.php": The file which allows you to post an article to a newsgroup. This file can be removed, if the system is set on readonly (see below).
• $file_language="lang/english.lang": Reference to the language definition file.
• $file_footer: Optionally, the name of a file can be indicated, which will be attached to every article posted to a newsgroup.
• $file_groups: Name of the file where the names of the newsgroups are in.

Newsserver setup

• $server: Hostname or IP of the newsserver
• $port: Port of the newsserver, normally 119
• $post_server: Optionally an extra newsserver can be indicated here which is used by post.php for writing articles. This is useful if two newsservers need to be accessed, a fast read-only server and a slow server to post articles. Be aware that it might take some time until the posted article will show up on your main newsserver ($server), which you use to read articles.
• $post_port: Port of your post-newsserver
• $server_auth_user: If the newsserver requires authentication by name and password put your username here. Otherwise just set the variable to "".
• $server_auth_pass: Put your password here.

Grouplist Layout

• $gl_age: true, if in index.php colors should indicate how old is the last article in the group

Thread Layout

• $treestyle: The appearance of the message tree:
  • 0: Simple listing of the articles
  • 1: Easy listing of the articles, with some more HTML tags
  • 2: Simple listing in a table
  • 3: Threaded with HTML-tags (UL, li)
  • 4: Threaded with text characters
  • 5: Threaded with graphical images
  • 6: Threaded with text characters and table
  • 7: Threaded with graphical images table (the normal view)
• $thread_show["date"],
• $thread_show["subject"],
• $thread_show["author"]:
  • true: the date / the subject / the author are displayed in the thread
  • false: output is suppressed.
• $thread_show["authorlink"]: Set true to add a mailto-link to the email address of the author, false else
• $thread_show["replies"]: Set this to false, if you only want the first article of a thread to be showed in your thread.php. Maybe you also want to set $file_article to "article-flat.php".
• $thread_show["lastdate"]]: If set to true, newsportal shows the date of the last recent article in a thread instead of the real date of the article. This makes only sense if $thread_show["replies"] is set to false.
• $thread_show["threadsize"]: Shows how many articles are in a thread. This makes also only sense if $thread_show["replies"] is set to false.
• $thread_maxSubject: Maximum number of characters of the subject displayed
• $maxarticles: This number indicates the maximum amount of overview data of a newsgroup newsportal tries to get from the newsserver. "0" means no limitation. $maxarticles also indicates the amount of articles to be stored in the spoolfiles. A lower value means less work for newsportal
• $maxarticles_extra: The problem with $maxarticles is that all article data must be completely requested again by the new server, if the indicated value is exceeded. $maxarticles_extra can be set to prevent this. The article-spool will only be restructured if $maxarticles + $maxarticles_extra articles are present, whereby $maxarticles many article data are requested. Only if an exact given number of articles should be displayed on the web page, the value of this variable schould be set "0", but this will slow NewsPortal down.
• $age_count: Number of different age levels for the coloured marking of articles
• $age_time[n]: maximal age of an article in seconds, so that the article gets marked with the colour
• $age_color[n]: n is a natural number > = 1 and all numbers from 1 to n must be assigned, gaps are not permitted.
• $age_color[n]: The colour in which the article is marked
• $thread_sort_order: The sort sequence for the articles:
  • 0: No assortment, articles are displayed in the order in which they are polled from the server. This is nearly like ascending assortment.
  • 1: ascending assortment, the oldest articles to the top.
  • -1: descending assortment, the newest articles to the top.
• $thread_sort_type: kind of sorting:
  • "thread": order by thread, newest thread on top/bottom
  • "article": order by article, newest article on top/bottom
• $articles_per_page: If this value is not 0, the maximum amount of articles is given, which are to be displayed on one page at the same time. The thread will be split into individual pages.
• $startpage: In connection with $$articles_per_page the variable indicates, which page is to be displayed first:
  • "first": The page with the newest articles
  • "last": the page with the oldest articles

Frames

• $frame_articles: Name of the article frame. Must be the same as defined in thread_frameset.php.
• $frame_thread: Name of the thread frame.
• $frame_groups: Name of the frame for the grouplist, normally set to "_top" to open a new frameset.
• $frame_post: Name of the frame for post.php
• $frame_threadframeset: Name of the frame, in which the frameset is to appear, which takes up the article and thread Frames. Normally set to "_top".
• $frame_externallink: Target frame for external links within articles.

Article layout

• $article_show["Subject"],
• $article_show["From"],
• $article_show["Newsgroups"],
• $article_show["Organization"],
• $article_show["Date"],
• $article_show["Message-ID"],
• $article_show["User-Agent"],
• $article_show["References"]: "true" displays the respective header line in article.php, by "false" it is suppressed.
• $article_show["From_link"]: Set true to add a mailto-link to the email address of the author, false else. This only affects the address in the header of an article.
• $article_show["From_rewrite"]: regular expression that converts the email-adress (to make it invisible to spam-harvesters for example)
• $article_showthread: true, if under every article the subthread of that article should be showed, false if not.
• $article_graphicquotes: Graphical representation of quotes instead of a > character?

Article flat-view

• $articleflat_articles_per_page: how many articles will be shown on one single page
• $articleflat_chars_per_articles: After how much characters articles will be cut in flat-view. A link will then be provided, so your visitors can view the full article by clicking on it.

Message posting

• $send_poster_host: true means that a header-line named "X-HTTP-Posting-Host:" will be attached to every posted article, set to the hostname of the user who wrote the article.
• $readonly: if set to true, the newsportal is read-only. The file post.php can be safely removed.
• $testgroup: if set to true newsportal checks if a group is listed in groups.txt when accessed through thread.php. Otherwise a group could be seen simply by entering the right URL, although the group is not displayed in the group list.
• $validate_email: Sets how newsportal checks an email address in post.php for syntax:
  • 0: no examination. Not recommended, since the newsserver will give an error message, if the address is not syntactically correct.
  • 1: Checks the address on syntactic correctness.
  • 2: Additionally a MX or A record is checked for the domain-name of the e-mail address. Newsportal performs a hostname lookup.
• $organization: Name of your organization. Put after the "Organization:"-header when posting articles.
• $setcookies: Permits the user to save his name and his email-address as cookies in his browser.
• $anonym_address: If you want to allow your users to not post their email address, you can do this by setting this variable to an address, that will be posted if the author let the email-field empty. Set this to a valid address, and create an autoresponder for this address, so that users, that use normal newsreaders get a response if they write a mail to this address.
• $msgid_generate: should newsportal generate the message id? Available settings:
  • "no": do not generate a message-id. The server will generate the id instead
  • "md5": Generate a hash out of the contents of the article and use this as the local part of the message-id. This will prevent the posting of duplicate articles.
• $msgid_fqdn: The full qualified domain name that will be used as the domain-part of the message-id. You can set the domain of your webserver here for example. By default this is set to $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] which contains your server-address.

Attachments

• $attachment_show: true, if you want attachments to be shown
• $attachment_delete_alternative: if true, non-text attachments inside a multipart/alternative block will be deleted, if there is a text-only alternative.
• $attachment_uudecode: if true, newsportal tries to decode uuencoded attachments. This option is very buggy and slow.

Safety settings

• $block_xnoarchive: if set true, don't show articles that have "X-No-Archive: yes" in the header. I don't think this makes sense, because newsportal is not an archive. But some people wanted such a "feature".

Cache

• $cache_articles: true if you want articles to be cached. This feature is experimental, but is recommended if you have groups with a lot of attachments. This feature makes problems if articles were canceled, because newsportal doesn't notice this.
• $cache_index: After how many seconds the grouplist in index.php should be reloaded
• $cache_thread: After how many seconds the thread in thread.php should ask the newsserver if there are new articles in the group.

Misc

• $title: The value of this variable is put in the title-header of the generated webpages.
• $cutsignature: if set to true, the signature will be cut off when replying to articles
• $compress_spoolfiles: Sets whether the spool files should be compressed or not. This is recommended under normal conditions, since the size of the spoolfiles shrinks approximately to about 15% of the original size. Be aware that some PHP-Versions do not support compressing
• $www_charset: Charset of your websites. For example iso-8859-15 for central europe, iso-8859-2 for east europe, utf-8 for unicode or koi8-r for russia
• $iconv_enable: Enable automatic conversion of charsets. So, for example, if your charset is iso-8859-1, you can also read utf-8 encoded postings and vice versa
• $timezone: Timezone relative to GMT. Set it to +1 if you live in a CET zone. This setting only changes the behaviour of how dates are shown. When you post articles newsportal don't set any date-headers.

Group specific config

$group_config=array(
	'^de\.alt\.fan\.aldi$' => "aldi-fan.inc.php",
	'^de\.alt\.' => "de-alternative.inc.php",
	'\.comp\.' => 'computer.inc.php'
);

<?
$readonly=false;
?>

Safety notes

• Articles could be posted anonymously (i.e. spamming), see $send_poster_host
• There are lists with so-called "open" newsservers in the internet. Mostly "open" doesn't mean for this server that everyone is allowed to use this server. Normally it means that the operator of the server forgot to protect his server adequatly. So before using an "open" newsserver, you should make sure that the operator permits the use of his server for newsportal.
• Posting articles anonymously is not accepted in most UseNet groups. Before you give writing access to a newsgroup, you should ask the users in the newsgroup if they have no objections. Do not give public write access on UseNet newsgroups, if you do not know exactly, what you are doing!
• Do not use the cancel-features of newsportal, if you don't know what you are doing! Cancel means removing articles worldwide on every newsserver!

Compatibility

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