What is CuteNews?

CuteNews is a RSS Newsfeed script that lets you create, maintain and publish news articles and have them available both on your web site and as an RSS news feed. CuteNews has many features including letting visitors comment on your articles. CuteNews does not require a MySQL database.

Requirements:

1. A CGI Account
2. Latest stable release of CuteNews (Version 1.4.5 was used for this tutorial.)

IMPORTANT SECURITY NOTE!

This tutorial might not have been written during the release of the most current version of this script, but may work with newer versions. It is the domain owner's responsibility to be sure that any script that is run on their CGI server is secure and stable. This means making sure that the script and all it's associated files are of the most recent stable and secure version available.

Restrictions:

Remember that only your main account can access CGI scripts on your server. Any hosting or extra FTP accounts that access these scripts may cause your account to be deactivated. To reactivate your account, you'll have to contact support.

For this script to work correctly, please place it's files in a directory created in your CGI server's root directory. Do not place this script in your cgi-bin directory, if you have one.

You may need to know how to edit the php script software that you wish to display the news on. This may require knowing how to edit your script software's templates. We can not provide assistance on editing such software as there are too many programs and each have different code. Please consult the documentation of the php script you wish to use CuteNews with. We do provide some limited instructions below for including CuteNews on your web site, including HTML-based web sites.

Installation:

1. Log in to your CGI server using an FTP program. Create directory for CuteNews. For this tutorial, we are going to use a directory called cutenews.

2. Unzip the files from the CuteNews download archive into it's own directory. Then upload them to the cutenews directory on your CGI server.

3. Change all files and all directories permissions to 777, including the cutenews directory itself. Some FTP programs can let you select more than one file/directory and change the permissions of the selected items. You can safely delete the Thumbs.db file from the images directory, if present.

4. Point your web browser to your cutenews installation directory. This should be something similar to http://cgi.yourdomain.com/cutenews/index.php where yourdomain.com is your actual domain name and cutenews is where you uploaded the cutenews files to. This is also the URL you will use from now on to log into, set up and administer your CuteNews articles and feeds.

5. You will see the CuteNews Installer. Click on the Proceed Installation button.

6. You will then get a page with a warning that a lot of files and directories are not writable. Go back into your CGI server, and inside the cutenews directory change the file permissions for the new directories created. There may be quite a few. Do not close the web browser.

7. When done changing permissions, go back to your web browser and click the Proceed Installation button.

8. Set up the configuration:
   
   Full URL to Cute News directory: http://cgi.yourdomain.com/cutenews
   This should be your domain and the directory you installed cutenews into.
   It may already be filled in for you.
   
   Administrator Username: (Pick a username for your administration log in).
   Password: and Retype Password: (Pick the administrator's password).
   Nickname: (Choose a name that is displayed when you post in CuteNews. This field is optional).
   Email: (Type in your full email address).

9. Click the Proceed Installation button. Cutenews is now installed.

10. Log into your CGI server and delete this file from the cutenews directory:
    

    /inc/install.mdu

Setting Up RSS:

1. Log into Cutenews at http://cgi.yourdomain.com/cutenews/index.php (substituting youdomain.com and cutenews to match your own site). Use your new administartion username (not the nickname) and password.

2. Click on the Options link. Click Integration Wizards (News and RSS) link.

3. Click Rss Setup and Integration. This is especially necessary for those who want to show cutenews on their web server or plain HTML sites (ie. in web page files that end with .html or .htm).

4. Click on the Proceed with RSS Configuration button.

5. Enter a url where you'd like to put your CuteNews RSS feed, even if the file doesn't yet exist. Such as http://cgi.yourdomain.com/cutenews/rss.php, for example.

6. Type in a title for your RSS feed, such as 'My Site News' or anything that identifies your web site news. The other options can usually be left at default.

7. Click Save configurations and proceed. On the next page click Proceed with RSS Customization. Here you can set how many articles to show. 10 articles is default. You can also determine what categories to show. If you haven't created any, then you can return to this page via Options - Integration Wizards (News and RSS) - RSS Setup and Integration. When at the setup screen, just click Skip to Customization.

8. Click on the Generate HTML code. This is the code you will put in your HTML file to show a small RSS icon people can click on to add the RSS feed to their browser or RSS news readers. If you are setting up to display the news articles on your own web site, copy and paste the HTML code to a text editor and save it so you can remember it later. Then follow instructions below for adding the news to your HTML web site.

Using CuteNews:

Add Categories:

Click on Options, Edit Categories to add categories to your news system.

Adding News Articles:

You can add a short story line that will show up in the RSS feeds as added text under the headline. Click on the Toggle full story button to create the full story. If you need more space, click on the [expand] link above the smilies in the grey bubble on the right.

Click Article Options to set other options for the article. Click Add News when done editing.

Showing News On Your Site:

Setup:

In Options, click Integration Wizards (News and RSS). Click Integrate News into your site. Fill in the information to set up the code.

Number of Active News to Display:
How many news headlines to display on your site. 10 is a good number here.

Template to Use When Displaying News:
Use default if you're not sure here, until you learn more about CuteNews.

Categories to Show News From:
Select category or categories of news to show. If none are created, it'll show all news you have.

Start 'Displaying' From...
This is nice for you to set up news items which are not displayed in the news area. For example, if you set the start from to say, 5, it will display news item #5 and news items 4, 3, 2 and 1 will never be displayed. Leave blank if you want all news to show.

Reverse News Order: Shows news in reverse order, in case you'd like to display oldest first instead of newest first.

Static Include:
It's best to leave this off, unless you do not want people to see the full story and comments page.

When done, click on Proceed to Integration.

Using The Resulting Code You are then given some code to display the news in a php-based web site. Note that the file you insert the code into must have a .php extension.

PHP Sites:

There are many different PHP sites and each has a different way to add code to the site. It would not be possible to cover every possible installation. However, most sites use templates for creating the pages. You will need to put this code into one of the template files for it to display on your site. To do this, you will need to consult the documenatation of the script you are using. We are unable to provide assistance in these matters. However, we do have a few script tutorials which may help to give you more information.

HTML Sites:

Even if you have a plain HTML site (ie. if you wish to add news to an HTML file with filenames ending in .html or .htm), you can still show CuteNews articles. The link you need is not the one generated from the Integrate News into your site area as mentioned above. Instead, you will need the code you saved from the Setting Up RSS section above. Take out the actual link from the code (not the entire code). This would be something like http://cgi.yourdomain.com/cutenews/rss.php for example.

Next you will need to set up an HTML/RSS feed generator to show the news on your web site. There are two ways to do this. One would be to use the online generator found at RSS2HTML. Follow the steps online to set up your feed. When you get to the final page, use the second (non-bolded) link for your code and put it in an iframe such as the example below (replacing the red item with the non-bolded link you were given from the generator).

<iframe style="width:180px;height:210px" name="myfeed" frameborder="0" src="http://www.rss2html.com/rss2html.php?TEMPLATE=template-1-3-1.htm&XMLFILE=http://cgi.yourdomain.com/cutenews/rss.php">
</iframe>

You may need to edit the width and height, as well as the feed title to fit your web site. Then place this code into your HTML code where you'd like your news feed to appear. Be sure that the code is all on one line. It is shown on mutliple lines above for easy reading.

The second way to do this is to try running the RSS2HTML script on your own CGI server. We have a tutorial on how to do this. However, the last version we tried, we could not get it to work reliably. You may want to try it with the most recent version of the software. But if it does not work, you may still be able to resort to the instructions above for using the online generator.

Troubleshooting:

I can't get the news to show up on my site.

Be sure you have followed the instructions carefully. Also it may be that either the php script you are using will not show this type of news feed (if you are entering this via a web-based interface) or that you may have placed the php code in the wrong file, or did not copy or type it in correctly or in the right place in the php file. Due to the variations of php script codes in existance, there may be a need for some trial-and-error. If you are still having problems, you may wish to consult the program documenation or seek help from any public forum or support that the authors of the php script your trying to use may provide, or the CuteNews forum.

Support:

If you have any problems or questions about CuteNews, please see the CuteNews Web Site.

Active Web Hosting may not be able to provide support for this program or it's installation.