XcNews - A Website News/Events Article Database
by XCENT - www.xcent.com

XcNews displays news/events on a web page. It can be fully integrated into your website and maintain a 100% seamless 
look. It utilizes an HTML document template to do this. You create a HTML document using any HTML editor you like and 
insert a special COMMENT tag into the document where you want the article list or items to appear at. You put the XcNews.asp file, and your custom HTML template, usually called XcNews.htm, in the same directory within your website.
Then, in the rest of your website, you just reference the XcNews.asp document, and the news/event database will automatically work seamlessly within your website. Note: You create links to XcNews.asp, not XcNews.htm.

XcNews can list articles in a variety of ways. You maintain and update news articles on your website using just 
a browser! No HTML editors or programming is needed for users to maintain information in XcNews.

Notice: Please read the enclosed license file before installing or running this application (XcClassified Pro). By using any of the enclosed files, you agree to be bound by the terms of the license agreement. 

Since XcNews is a free product, technical support is not provided for XcNews. If you have any questions or issues regarding XcNews, you should consult the FAQ at www.xcent.com/products/xcent_faq.htm.



Requirements

XcNews is an Active Server Page script application for your website. It utilizes a Microsoft Access MDB database file to store article information. An MDB file can be used directly by the Microsoft Jet Database engine, or Microsoft Access. The Microsoft Jet Database engine should be installed on the web server. It requires your website to be hosted on Microsoft Internet Information Server, or equivalent. Ask your ISP if they support Active Server Pages. If they don't, find one that is. See our website for our recommendations. For the latest version of the Access/Jet engine and the ADO data access library that XcNews utilizes, see the Microsoft website www.microsoft.com. 

XcNews is a totally free script. All that we ask is that you keep the link to XCENT at the bottom of the page (User License agreement article 3B-D). If we find that someone has removed the link, or taken credit for the script themselves, they will be asked to remove the script from their site.



Creating the Template

  1. Create a new XcNews.htm file in your HTML Editor (FrontPage, Notepad, whatever...).
  2. Where you want the calendar to appear, put the tags "<COMMENT>XCNEWS</COMMENT>". Note: the tags do not include the quote marks.
  3. Link to the XcNews.ASP file, not the XcNews.htm file, in the rest of your website.
  4. Upload  XcNews.asp and XcNews.htm to the same directory on your website.

 

Support

XcNewsl is a freely available script. You can freely use this script on your own website in accordance with the license agreement. Since this script is provided free, there is no inherent support provided for XcNews. However, questions or issues you have with this script may be addressed via a message board or the FAQ on our web site. Visit www.xcent.com/products.htm 


Editing Articles

To edit articles directly on your website, you need to login to XcNews with an Administrative login. To do this, you use the same base URL you would to  reference the XcNews script, but add a parameter to it. You need to add ?cmd=admin to the base URL to do an administrative login to XcNews. The login should be either your name, or your Email address. The password is "test" by default. See the Advanced section below on how to change the password.

For example, if you install the XcNews script into the root of your website, the URL to access it would be something like this:

HTTP://WWW.MYSITE.COM/XcNews.asp


To do an administrative login to your news site, you would use the URL:
HTTP://WWW.MYSITE.COM/XcNews.asp?cmd=admin


After you enter this URL into the browser, you should see the XcNews login prompt.



Advanced

You can change the behavior of the XcNews script by passing parameters to the script.
Some example are:

?cmd=showtop By using the above parameter, XcNews will display the most  recent article, the list all the other available article  below it.
?cmd=detail By using the above parameter, XcNews will show all available articles all on one page. This might be useful if your articles are all very short, as it could generate an extremely long  page if there are a large number of articles.
?cmd=admin By using the above paramter, XcNews will go into administrative mode (after a successful login). In administrative mode, you can add, edit, or delete articles in the database.




Changing the Login Password

To change the login password, you need to edit the XcNewsConfig.asp script file. You can edit this file with any plain text file editor, like NOTEPAD, or WORDPAD. A couple of lines down in the file, you will see the line:

gsAdminPassword = "test"


You can change the password from TEST to anything you want. Whatever text you put between the quote marks, is what you change the password to. Avoid using quote marks within the password, unless you understand how to properly embed them within a VBScript literal string. For example, if you wanted to change the password to DAYTONA, you would change the above line to look like:

gsAdminPassword = "daytona"

Common Problems

 
  • If you get an error reading:
        '80004005' [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Could not delete from specified tables'
    Make sure that your database is not marked as Read Only.  This error frequently happens when people use Frontpage to upload the script.
  • If you get an error like one of the following:
        Data type mismatch in criteria expression
    Try alternating between one of the two settings for gsSQLDateDelimiter. You do this by adding/removing the apostrophe to/from the two lines in the XcNewsConfig.asp file.

 

Database Security

 
  • By default,  the database resides in the same folder as your classified script.  For security reasons,  we recommend that you at least change the name of your database file.  If your ISP allows,  it is recommended that you put the database a directory above your webroot directory (or located outside of your website directory hierarchy).  This prevents someone from downloading your database trough a web browser.  
  • If you cannot move the database to a directory above your webroot,  we recommend giving it a unique name unrelated to it's original name. Just right click on the .mdb file,  and click "Rename". You can then rename the file.  Make sure your file name ends with ".mdb". Once you rename the file, you must change the "gsConnect" variable in the "XcNewsConfig.asp" file. 
  • If you do move the database to a directory above the webroot,  make sure that the "gsConnect" variable in the "XcNewsConfig.asp" file points to the correct database location.  
    Example of a database residing above the webroot  for the gsConnect variable.
                gsConnect = "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ=" & Server.MapPath("..\XCNEWS.MDB")             
  • If you attempt to open the MDB file with Microsoft Access, and it asks you if you want to convert it to a newer format, you should always select NO. You do not want to convert the database file unless you are fully aware of the requirements and circumstances of doing so. In other words, do not open the MDB file with Access 2000.

All code, documentation, data, file formats and related materials are Copyright 1998-2000, Xcent, Inc. All third party products mentioned above may have other rights, trademarks or statements that have no direct relationship to this product. XCENT, www.xcent.com, and XcNews are all trademarks of Xcent, Inc.