| NewsPro
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A Brief Description
What the developer says:
'Full-featured and flexible news updating script. Includes support for unlimited users, easy web-based set-up and configuration, fully customisable news style, auto-archiving, support for add-on modules, ability to maintain different news pages & categories, e-mail notification option, and plenty more.’ What I say:
‘NewsPro is basically your complete system for publishing news on your web site. It offers loads of great features and is very easy to use, install and customise. It offers features such as automatic archiving, searching functionality as well as a fantastic web-based management/administration panel.’ Overview
I first discovered NewsPro a year or so ago when looking for a script to manage my ‘What’s New’ page on my site because it got a bit too big and cumbersome to edit manually. When I found NewsPro I was expecting it to be a slow script which forced me into it’s way of presenting news. I also expected it to be very complicated to install and unlikely to work. What a shock I got. I uploaded the files as instructed, set the permissions, called up the script in my browser and instantly I was away. A couple of variables entered here and their and it was up and running. I then went on to spend many happy hours tinkering away with the various features it offered. Since then, I’ve followed NewsPro closely and used it on all my sites whenever I could. Features
The features NewsPro offers are quite overwhelming considering it’s a free script. It offers all the standard features you would expect from such a script such as multiple admin. ability, automatic archiving and headlines. But as well as that it offers features such as ‘built-in e-mail news list functionality’ which is very useful for maintaining a mailing list. NewsPro also offers the ability to search through all current news and archived very quickly which my visitors liked a lot when I added the feature. The Set-up Wizard
In my opinion, this is the feature that has made NewsPro such a great script and given it the original edge over other such scripts. The set-up wizard is the first part of the script you come into contact with. It basically leads you through the whole installation process in your web browser, meaning no annoying editing of .cgi and .pl files and instant testing. So you can check that the program works right away rather than having to constantly re-upload modified files. Modification
Through my years of use, I have found my self modifying NewsPro quite a few times for one reason or another. Usually just to improve integration within my web sites. I’m a pretty good Perl programmer and have released a few programs of my own, but even when I first used NewsPro and had little knowledge of Perl, I still found it reasonably easy to edit. I admit, the modifications were fairly minor but the actual coding of NewsPro is very well documented and clear so modification is reasonably easy, even for novice programmers. Support
When it comes down to support, the staff behind NewsPro appear to be reasonably good. Email responses are reasonably quick and helpful and forum support is very good indeed. I got a lot of help from the forum when modifying the script. Conclusion
When I came to write this article, I began by researching a few other popular and ‘high rated’ news scripts available on the net. I was hoping to find one as good as NewsPro so I could write a more interesting and comparative review but I was disappointed. I reviewed three other programs, the first didn’t work, the admin. script simply didn’t load and even after editing, failed to work fully. The second worked, but lacked a lot of features and the third seemed to have a lot of bugs and did some very odd things now and then. Therefore, I feel this review should end with a good note about this script, I’m not one hundred percent sure how to do this, so I’ll hope I already have at some point.
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| Homepage | http://www.amphibianweb.com/newspro/ |
| CGI-Index.com Listing | http://www.CGI-Index.com/Detail/151.html |
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| Version Reviewed | 3.7.5 |
| Software Cost | Free |
| Software Author | Amphibian Internet |
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| Review Rating (by visitors) | 
Rating: 10.00 Votes: 1 |
| Rate It |
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| Review Author | Neil Skirrow |
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| All reviews listed on CGI-Index.com are written by individuals who are not associated with the script developer, they are an independent view of the software from one individual's point of view. If you disagree, please submit your own review. |
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