News Wizard v 3.0

Copyright 1999-2000 Oliver W. Schulz
Contact: Oliver W. Schulz
(oliver@ulices.com)

Your objective is to gather as many visitors addresses as possible, contact them and convert them into new customers? You wish to be present anywhere, anytime. You want to offer your products and services and keep your customers informed about your news ?

The News Wizard is certainly the right tool for you. He collects all the names and email addresses of your visitors and automatically sends out your newsletter. Reach thousands of potential customers all over the world from virtually any place at any time.

 Contents:

Features
Advantages
Installation
Usage
License Agreement and Disclaimer
Outlook

Features of the News Wizard

• Gathers customer data via the internet and stores them in its own database
• Anti-Spam feature (double opt-in)
• Date and IP-logging
• Automatically sends your newsletter to your new subscribers
• Lets your customers unsubscribe and keeps record of their petition
• Recognizes re-subscribers
• Checks for data dupes
• Checks for input errors
• Automatically addresses your newsletter in a personalized way considering name and gender of your subscribers
• Offers complete administration over the internet
• Allows uploads of new newsletters, subscriber-lists, etc.
• Takes care of mailing your newsletter to all subscribers
• Automatically sends your newsletter to a number of recipients according to a preselected subscription date-range
• Automatically sends a journal with statistics after completion of every mailing session
• Allows the creation of new administrators
• News Wizard is available in English and German

Advantages of the News Wizard

• Login to your server account and create a data directory under your cgi-bin directory. Make sure this directory has full read and write permissions.
  

• Open sendnews.cgi, editnews.cgi, makeadmin.cgi and upload.cgi with your favorite text editor and edit the 'Custom-Definitions' according to your specific data. You need only define the variables that are included in this part of the script. Everything else in the script can be changed if you want to but will not be necessary to be changed in order to make the News Wizard run properly.
  
  Change the first line of the files to reflect the location of the perl interpreter on your system. If the interpreter is at /bin/perl, then this line should be #!/bin/perl. You can get this information with the command "which perl" or "where perl". Check with the system admin if you're not sure.
  If necessary, change the variable that contains the location of the mail program on your system, followed by a -t.
  Ex: '/usr/bin/sendmail -t'; Again, check with the sys admin if you don't know the location of your sendmail.
  
  The variables are explained as follows:
  
  $data_location
  The path to where your data directory is located.
  
  $sendmail_location
  The path to the location of the sendmail-program on your server.
  
  $datafile
  The path to the recipients.dat file that stores your subscribers.
  
  $users
  The path to the users.dat file that stores your administrators.
  
  $newsletter
  The path to the newsletter.txt file that stores your newsleter text.
  
  $editnews_url
  The URL of your editnews.cgi script.
  
  $upload_url
  The URL of your upload.cgi script.
  
  $makeadmin_url
  The URL of your makeadmin.cgi script.
  
  $sendnews_url
  The URL of your sendnews.cgi script.
  
  $letter_from
  The default email-address which will be shown to your subscribers as sender of the current newsletter. This data can be changed from within the program.
  
  $letter_reply
  The address your subscribers send any emails when they reply to your newsletter.
  
  $subject
  The subject of your newsletter message sent out to your subscribers. Please note that this data has to be ONE single string like "current_newsletter" (note the underscore replacing a blank space).This data can be changed from within the program.
  
  $logo
  The path to the image you want to appear as your page logo. We have included the fancy, rotating "News Wizard" logo.
  
  $backcolor
  The background colour of your pages if you do not use a background image.
  
  $backimage
  The background image of your pages.
  
  $defaultsend
  This variable determines whether new subscribers receive the current issue of your newsletter immediately upon submitting their data (subscription). If set to "Yes" they will automatically receive your newsletter. If set to "No" their data (subscription) will be stored in the database but they will not be sent your newsletter unless you start a mailing session.
  
  
  The sendnews.cgi file is responsible for the actual sending of your newsletter.
  The editnews.cgi and makeadmin.cgi files take care of all administrative work.
  The upload.cgi enables you to upload your newsletters and entire subscribers lists onto the server via the web.It needs only small editing: the place where to store the uploaded files.
  And finally the CGI.pm is a generic perl-module that is required by the upload.cgi file.
  

• Once all the necessary variables are set, copy the cgi-files into your cgi-bin directory on your server and make sure you CHMOD them to 755.

• Now open the two forms edit-news.htm and news-form.htm and change the "<FORM> - tag so that it points to editnews.cgi on your domain. It should look something like:
  <form ACTION="http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/editnews.cgi" METHOD=post>.

• Now open the form make-admin.htm and change the "<FORM> - tag so that it points to makeadmin.cgi on your domain. It should look something like:
  <form ACTION="http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/makeadmin.cgi" METHOD=post>.

• Now copy these files to your public directory (where all the other html-docs are stored).
  
• Also copy the small little logo newswizz.gif and the background bkground.gif to your public directory. If you don't see these images while running the Wizard, you probably indicated an incorrect path in the custom definition section of the scripts.
  
• The files contained in the data directory should be copied into the same directory on your server. They need full read and write permissions to be set.
  recipients.dat is the file that will store all your subscribers and that will serve as the recipients list when sending your mailings to your subscribers.
  newsletter.txt is the actual pure ASCII text file that will store the message sent out to your subscribers. Make sure these two files are CHMOD to 777 since they will have to be able to be overwritten by the News Wizard.
  users.dat will hold the data for authorized administrators that have access to the News-Wizard administration section. This file must also be CHMOD to 777.

If you wish the installation to be done by us, just check the box on the order form or email us and we will take care of everything.
If we can be of any further help please let us know.

The newsletter subscription form is called news-form.htm.
To access the administration of the News Wizard call edit-news.htm.
By default the administrator's name is admin. The default password is password. You should create your own access codes and then delete the default values from the users.dat file.

The administration level is mostly self-explaining and allows you to maintain your newsletter engine. The subscribers list recipients.dat as well as the newsletter.txt textfile can be edited online or uploaded in one piece. This feature allows for comfortable updates prepared offline on any machine and then simply uploading everything onto the server. We think this is a real time and money saver.

News Wizard also supports date-selective mailing. Besides determining the sender and the current issue (subject) on the Mail Warm-Up page you can also define a certain date range for your mailings. That means that you can choose a group of subscribers who have subscribed in a certain period of time to send your newsletter to. This is useful when you want to reach subscribers (e.g. for a special offer) depending on how long sombody has already been your customer.

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY

THIS SOFTWARE, THE INFORMATION, CODE AND/OR EXECUTABLES AS WELL AS THE ACCOMPANYING FILES PROVIDED ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR SELLER BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, LOSS OF DATA, LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS OR SPECIAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF THE AUTHOR OR SELLER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
ANY LIABILITY OF THE AUTHOR OR SELLER WILL BE LIMITED EXCLUSIVELY TO PRODUCT REPLACEMENT OR REFUND OF PURCHASE PRICE.

GOOD DATA PROCESSING PROCEDURE DICTATES THAT ANY PROGRAM BE THOROUGHLY TESTED WITH NON-CRITICAL DATA BEFORE RELYING ON IT.

THE USER MUST ASSUME THE ENTIRE RISK OF USING THE PROGRAM.

The file 'upload.cgi' is Copyright (C) 1996 Jeffrey D. Carnahan and 'CGI.pm' Copyright 1995-1998 Lincoln D. Stein. Both files have been added to this package free of charge.