Documentation
MATCHMASTERS:  V1.1


System Requirements

  • Apache web server - will work with NT with modifications
  • Perl 5
  • Advanced knowledge of Perl and CGI required
  • Crontab required to run matchbot automatically (not required)

Preliminaries

  • Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.
  • Download the tarfile for this program and save it to your desktop.
  • Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM
  • After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

configure.cgi

This file pretty much runs the whole show.  If you screw this one up don't count on anything working properly.   In other words, make sure you take the time to do this step CORRECTLY.  Ask your administrator if you need to.  Below are the variables used in ALL of the other cgi scripts.  All of the other cgi programs USE configure.cgi to figure out where certain things are.

$mailprogram Path to sendmail on your server
$admin Your email address (include backslash)
$subject Subject of emails noticies sent by matchbot
$memberurl URL of your member area
$htmldir Full path to your HTML area of this installation (yourdomain.com/matchmasters)
$memberfilesdir Full path to directory which contains the data, messages, addressbook directories (yourdomain.com/cgibin/matchmasters)
$datadir Full path to the data directory (yourdomain.com/cgibin/matchmasters/data)
$addressbook Full path to the addressbook directory (yourdomain.com/cgibin/matchmasters/addressbook)
$messages Full path to the messages directory (yourdomain.com/cgibin/matchmasters/messages)
$cgidir RELATIVE path to the cgi-bin directory   (/cgibin/matchmasters)
$imageuri RELATIVE path to the /members/images/ directory (/matchmasters/members/images)

Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files

  • Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi) into your cgi-bin
  • Upload the data (and all files inside), addressbook, and messages directory into your cgi-bin

Edit and Upload Remaining HTML files & gifs

  • Create the following directories inside of your webspace directories and transfer the files from the tar archive into their respective areas below:

http://www.yourdomain.com/members/     contains the index.html (member login page)

http://www.yourdomain.com/members/images/   contains the nopic file (transfer this as binary data)

http://www.yourdomain.com/members/pix/        contains button images for login.cgi (transfer this as binary data)

  • Edit the /cgibin/matchmasters/data/header.html and footer.html files to customize the header and footers - just cut and past raw html into these files.

File Access Permissions

File access permissions must be set correctly for this program to run. The table below lists the permissions of each file which are to be set by the unix command ( chmod ) used to set the correct access permissions. You must set the access permissions for each of these files.  Set all the .cgi files to 755.   Set the messages and addressbook directories to 777.  Set all the files inside of the data directory to 777.

Testing the System

Please use the MATCHMASTERS website to see how this program works

Using the Matchbot

Once you have members in your database you can run match.cgi (the matchbot) from telnet or set it to run daily/weekly as a cronjob.   No editing is necessary.  A log of the matchbot's activities is stored inside the data directory (log).