News portal

Version 0.24pre1

Introduction

News portal is a PHP based newsreader. It is licensed under the GNU Public License (see enclosed LICENSE).

Overview

This script collection enables the access to a newsserver (by NNTP) from a webpage. It allows you to combine web-forums and newsgroups. The script is also suitable for presentation of announce newsgroups on web pages, without having the user notice that he is in fact accessing a newsserver.

The main functionality of the script is located in the file newsportal.php3, which contains the major part of the implemented php3-functions. In addition to that there are four more php3-files, which are directly accessed by the browser.

• index.php3 shows the available newsgroups of the newsserver (if you have added the names to groups.txt)
• thread.php3 displays the article-overview of a newsgroup. The articles are displayed in a thread.
• article.php3 displays an individual article.
• post.php3 posts a message into a newsgroup. WARNING: This script produces absolutely not RFC conformal messages. Thus 'umlauts' in the Subject are not mime encoded ! It still works fine though.
• config.inc contains the configuration.
• body.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.
• german.lang : The German language definitions
• english.lang : The English language definitions

Since fetching the article overview of the newsserver takes quite some time, newsportal caches this data in the directory spool/. Any file can be put in this directory, they will automatically be regenerated.

Installation:

1. download the zip or tar.gz archive
2. unzip it to a directory
3. The fileconfig.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" ).

Configuration

The following adjustments can be made in config.inc

Directories and files:

• $file_newsportal="newsportal.php3":Name of the file containing the newsportal-functions.
• $file_groups="index.php3": The file which shows the list of available newsgroups.
• $file_thread="thread.php3": The file which shows the article-thread of a selected newsgroup
• $file_article="article.php3": Displays an article
• $file_post="post.php3": 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="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.

Newsserver setip

• $server : Hostname or IP of the newsserver
• $port : Port of the newsserver, normally 119
• $post_server: Optionally an extra newsserver can be indicated here which is used by post.php3 for writing articles. This is useful if two newsservers need to be accessed, a fast read-only server and a slow server to post articles. Be aware that it might take some time until the posted article will show up on your main newsserver ($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.

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
• $thread_fontPre: The code given here is put in front of every text fragment in thread.php3, i.e. font face or size can be set.
• $thread_fontPost: The same as $thread_fontPre, only code is appended at the end of the text.
• $thread_showDate,
  $thread_showSubject,
  $thread_showAuthor:
  • true: the date / the subject / the author are displayed in the thread
  • false: output is suppressed.
• $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".
• $age_count : Number of different age levels for the coloured marking of articles
• $$age_time[n] : maximal age of an article in seconds, so that the article gets marked with the colour $age_color[n]. n is a natural number > = 1 and all numbers from 1 to n must be assigned, gaps are not permitted.
• $age_color[n]: The colour in which the article is marked
• $thread_sorting : The sort sequence for the articles:
  • 0: No assortment, articles are displayed in the order in which they are polled from the server. This is nearly like ascending assortment.
  • 1: ascending assortment, the oldest articles to the top.
  • -1: descending assortment, the newest articles to the top.
• $articles_per_page: If this value is not 0, the maximum amount of articles is given, which are to be displayed on one page at the same time. The thread will be split into individual pages.
• $startpage: In connection with $$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
  The specification should be co-ordinated with $thread_sorting. "first" for 0 and 1, and "last" for -1.

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.php3, by "false" it is suppressed.

Frame support
Example files for the frame support are located in extras/frames/. In this section the names of the frames can be defined. If you want to use frames you have to set the variable $frame_thread to "thread_frameset.php3".

• $frame_articles: Name of the article frame. Must be the same as defined in thread_frameset.php3.
• $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.php3
• $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.

Safety settings

• $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.php3 can be safely removed.
• $testgroup : if set to "true" newsportal checks if a group is listed in groups.txt when accessed through thread.php3. Otherwise a group could be seen simply 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.php3 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.

General setting

• $title: The value of this variable is put in the title-header of the generated webpages.
• $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.
• $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

Safety notes

A few things must be kept in mind to not allow newsportal to open safety-holes:

• config.inc can be requested by every user that knows the filename, if you do not move it to a protected area of your webserver.

This script was originally (and actually still) only meant for access to local newsgroups. If you use it with UseNet newsgroups, following problems could show up:

• Articles could be posted anonymously (i.e. spamming), see $send_poster_host
• Newsportal produces 8-bit header lines (i.e. the Subject), which is not permitted. However there do not seem to be any problems.
• 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!

The author reserves the right not to be responsible for the topicality, correctness, completeness or quality of the program provided. Liability claims regarding damage caused by the program provided, will therefore be rejected.
In other words: Use this program at your own risk !

Compatibility

Newsportal should work with every phpserver with php3 support and every newsserver. Webserver and newsserver do not need to run on the same machine.

Contact

Florian Amrhein
email: florian.amrhein@gmx.de
WWW: http://florian-amrhein.de