| Ultimate Guestbook
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Introduction
Ultimate Guestbook is one of the latest offerings from the Madrona Park development team. Madrona Park originally developed Ultimate Bulletin Board, one of the most popular Perl forum scripts available. Ultimate Guestbook is pretty much your everyday Guestbook script but I was pleasantly surprised during installation at just what is does have to offer. Installation
Installation wasn’t too tricky. All it takes it a little bit of uploading of a couple of files, setting of permissions and then the rest is all web-based. You bring up your browser, run the script and start the configuration. Everything is well commented and explained and the configuration allows for a lot of customising of Ultimate Bulletin board. Everything from the text displayed on submission buttons to the ability to use HTML in Guestbook messages is available easily and quickly with just a couple of clicks. Features
Ultimate Guestbook offers some impressive features which I personally think are extremely useful and necessary. Everything from word censoring to input field adjustment is available. Word Censoring
This feature is sadly becoming a necessity today, but it’s a very valuable tool too. It basically offers the administrator the ability to ‘ban’ certain words from being displayed. So say I was to say ‘hello’ in my message but the administrator has banner ‘ell’. The script would detect it and print ‘h***o’ instead. Very useful in practice, perhaps not with my choice of example words. All censoring is performed within the administration panel and is very easy. HTML and UBB Code
This features allows the use of standard HTML code or Ultimate Bulletin Board code within message. This means things like [url]http://www.cgiscriptreview.com/[/url] can be used to display http://www.cgiscriptreview.com as an active hyperlink rather than just text. Standard HTML code is also available. Both these features are optional and can be turned off easily. Customisable Fields
The administration panels give the administrator the ability to change what information is requested. For example, rather than asking for a users URL, the script could ask what their pet was called. All fields can be altered as to whether they are required to be filled in by the user or not. Customisation
As mentioned above, customisation is very easy. This is because everything is web-based. Headers, footers and even copyright notes can be adjusted from the administration panel. All styles, colours and fonts can be changed too very quickly and easily from the browser. The script also gives you options such as how many Guestbook messages to display per page etc. Administration
The script offers a very easy to use administration panel. It offers all the features you’d expect such as configuration and styles adjustment and most importantly message deletion which is very easily done. The admin. panel also gives administrators the ability to alter censored words and change the general set-up of the script. The administration panels requires you to enter two passwords when performing any tasks. These are set at installation. The use of two passwords seemed very odd to me and I’ve never seen this method used before, however it does make sense to do this to increase overall security. Conclusion
Ultimate Guestbook is overall a very good script. However, their are lots of features that could still be added. I feel features such as message searching, message approval and private messages could be added amongst others. I also feel tools for exporting and importing databases could be very useful if swapping Guestbook scripts. But other than those features the script seems very well designed and bug-free.
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| Homepage | http://www.ugbdev.com |
| CGI-Index.com Listing | http://www.CGI-Index.com/Detail/73.html |
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| Version Reviewed | 1.1 |
| Software Cost | Free |
| Software Author | Madrona Park |
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| Review Rating (by visitors) | 
Rating: 0 Votes: 0 |
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| Review Author | Neil Skirrow |
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